I. Jason, the last man standing, is down. I repeat, THE HUSBAND IS DOWN. He is by far the least disgusting patient, at least, and his illness has resulted in absolutely nothing I had to clean up. II. But! Noah is fine. Ezra is also, finally, oh-thank-God fine and at back at school today. I don't think I need to tell you that, humor and poor-poor-me snark aside, I was really, really worried about that one. I have never seen any of my children that sick, for which I know I am lucky, because it obviously could have been so, so much worse. He's lost a ton of weight and is still sleeping approximately 18 hours a day, but last night around dinnertime he asked for scrambled eggs and meatballs and macaroni and steak and polenta and cheese and chicken and was basically grabbing anything from the fridge he could get his hands on to eat. A jar of mustard! A pomegranate! Parsley! Whatever! (Except for what's left of the raspberries. Those are being pointedly ignored.) Ike is improving but probably needs another day to be back at 100%. I'm still washing a lot of diapers. And if you, like... Read more →

...let me COUNT THE WAYS. I cleaned vomit off the top bunk. I cleaned vomit off the bottom bunk. I cleaned vomit off the bunk bed ladder and the floor. I cleaned one child's vomit out of the hair of another. I cleaned up after the world's grossest fucking diaper, BAR NONE. I cleaned up...the crib. Enough said. I cleaned vomit off the wall of the nursery, and the rocking chair. Also my brand-new, dry-clean-only sweater that I was stupidly wearing because that was before reality set in and all hope was shattered into a million disgusting, crusty pieces. I called the on-call pediatrician to find out if I needed to take my terrifyingly listless, still-unable-to-keep-solids-down-after-72-hours toddler to the ER or not. I went to the store for more Pedialyte only to realize I was standing in the stationary aisle, staring at sympathy cards and slowly going mad with fever. I came home and experienced some...digestive distress. I lay in bed and moaned at the ceiling fan while Jason baked the children COOKIES, since Noah was feeling so much better and Ezra...well, Ezra would probably be fine too, right? I lay in bed and muttered feverish I TOLD YOU SO'S... Read more →

After a brief turn for the better last night and this morning, we're now back to taking it one sip of Pedialyte at a time over here. Even popsicles are too wild and crazy for this party. And the less said about that banana, the better. Fuck this week. I'm out. Let's meet up on Monday for a do-over, deal? Read more →

Warning: This is probably going to be the grossest thing I have ever written about on the Internet. And I have written some gross fucking things. So, proceed with caution. Or don't. Just leave. Run away! Look out, behind you! It's a compulsive oversharing blogger in her pajamas! OH MY GOD WE'RE DOOMED. Yesterday afternoon, Ezra shuffled from his room post-nap. "My tummy hurts," he whined. We had a little chat about Poop, Do You Need To Go Do That, and I expertly diagnosed him with Who The Hell Knows, But Let's Try Some Cuddling On The Couch. So we cuddled. On the couch. Which is where we were when he suddenly bolted upright and vomited on me. A entire container of raspberries came up in repeated waves of bright reddish-magenta-colored puke all over my chest and lap and then the couch and on the floor as I picked him up and hauled ass towards the bathroom, where it also just. Kept. Coming. Holy. Fucking. SHIT. When it was over and the bathroom walls and surfaces were as coated with splattered raspberry hork as we both were, he burst into terrified tears and put his arms out for a hug.... Read more →

Over the weekend, Ike developed an obsession with the step in our living room. He spent a couple hours scooting back and forth in front of it, touching it, putting toys on top of it. At one point I caught him lying on his back and intently examining the lip from below. Fucking steps, how do they work? He was like a raptor in Jurassic Park, investigating the electric fences. Looking for weaknesses. Yesterday, he found one. ??? !!! About five minutes after discovering the finger-gripping, body-dragging properties of the floor vent, he managed to pull himself up and over the step. And then, resisting the siren call of That Random Power Cord That I Need To Move Right After I Figure Out What It's Even Bleeping Connected To In The First Place, he was so pleased with his new skill that he promptly rolled right back off it, just so he could climb up again. Pride & Doomudice There's something indescribably awesome about watching a baby purposely figure things out, as they scrunch up their faces and drool from all the tremendous effort it takes to get soupy brains and uncoordinated limbs in gear. And yet so bittersweet, because... Read more →

Happy Monday, Innernets! How was your weekend? Ours was fine! I learned two things: 1) When Ike comes down with his big brother's cold, he gets this hilariously gigantic cough -- CAAAAHHH-UGH CAAAAAHH-UGH-UGH-CAH -- and sounds exactly like an old man having a top-volume coughing fit at a quiet restaurant. So the next time you hear a cough like that and start looking for the person to scowl at, like GO OUTSIDE, DUDE, NO ONE WANTS TO HEAR YOU COUGHING UP YOUR LUNG, be forewarned that it could be my baby. 1a) I mean, you can still scowl at him, if you want. He won't care. Old-man cough badger don't give a shit. 1b) CAAAAHHHHH-UGH-GGG-CAH-UH-ETC. 2) Before you bundle your children up and send them outside to frolic in a couple inches of freshly fallen snow, you should PROBABLY confirm that the white stuff on the ground actually is snow. As opposed to a deadly, pointy mix of 10% snow and 90% ice. And you should confirm this fact through a testing method OTHER THAN watching your six-year-old pelt your three-year-old in the face with an iceball. 2a) He's fine! The cut didn't even need stitches. 2b) (dies) 2c) Though... Read more →

And with that, the question over whether or not he was telling me the truth was answered. We caught Noah in his first big, sustained lie yesterday. The details are exhaustively boring, but suffice to say he'd figured out a way to game his token/reward system at school and make us think he was earning more points for good behavior than he was. Then exchanging those points for treats at home like playing video games or getting some Halloween candy. (That is not actually from Halloween, but just what the boys call candy year-round here.) I'd grown suspicious and questioned him a few times, and he remained consistent with his cover story (his teacher couldn't find the stamp so she marked his paper with a crayon instead) and insisted that he was telling the truth. "I promise, Mom," he'd say, cooly and calmly, with perfect eye contact and an earnest, dimpled smile. That was what made me back off, every time: the eye contact. Noah remains a jumble of different quirks from both on and off the Spectrum -- at his last IEP his teacher said she absolutely didn't want to change his diagnosis code from the catch-all "Developmental Delay"... Read more →

First, I want to thank y'all for making me feel SO MUCH BETTER about the Tooth Fairy thing. I'm so glad we're not the only parents who have forgotten about lost teeth and woke up to devastated, disillusioned children. GLAD, I SAY. I AM COMFORTED BY YOUR CHILDREN'S PAIN. WE ARE ALL TERRIBLE PEOPLE, HOORAY! Second, I'm hoping today's confession will likewise be met with understanding instead of gasps of pearl-clutchy horror. Ezra is home sick today. Cough, fever, general whimperiness. I totally don't mind though, because Ezra is my favorite sick child. It's not that I enjoy seeing him sick and miserable or anything. It's just that he's just so...so... ...awwwwww poor little angel buddy when he's not feeling well. He's by far the most good-natured of the three when sick; the most likely to try his darnedest to Brave-Little-Toaster his way through it, right up until the moment when he decides instead to just curl up on the kitchen floor with a stuffed animal and a plastic waffle and take an impromptu nap. Noah, on the other hand, tends to get extra difficult -- illness brings out more of his, shall we say, challenging sensory/Spectrum-y behaviors, plus that... Read more →

So if you were around on Friday you're already aware that it took Baby Ike all of an hour and a half to make a complete jackass out of me. Post About Thing Baby Is Not Doing, Baby Immediately Up And Does It, All Casual-Like. Perhaps his reading comprehension is better than I previously thought as well. Highlighting their mother's general incompetence was a theme for the weekend, actually. On Saturday Tracey and Charlie came over for an evening of...um. I dunno. Food and baby stuffs. Dogs and Instagramming and YouTube and heavy metal on Pandora. We made slow-cooker jerk chicken and collards with bacon and while the kiddos were eating their frozen mini-pizzas from a box LIKE YEAH, Noah started hollering to me about his cheese falling out. I was in the middle of some REALLY IMPORTANT discussion about something that I no longer remember and wasn't particularly interested in pizza-cheese drama, like "Okay dude, whatever, just eat it anyway," but it turned out he was actually trying to tell me that his tooth had fallen out. Oh! Yeah. Don't eat that, after all. Everybody clapped and high-fived and made an appropriately big deal over it. We put the... Read more →

Okay, Internet. Here goes. There's something I haven't told you about Baby Ike. I don't want to sound all dramatic and hand-wringy about it, but I really can't pretend that it's not worrying me a little tiny teeny bit. MY BABY CAN'T READ! Wait. No. Wrong thing. Ike cannot sit up unassisted. In fact, he can't even really sit up if he's anything less than *fully* assisted, as in, sitting in a Bumbo or with both of my hands on him. Meanwhile, he's army-scooting around all over the place and occasionally getting up on his hands and knees. His neck control is perfect. Yesterday he pulled himself to almost a full stand from his changing table using nothing but the front of my shirt and the ends of my hair. Yet in a high chair -- where he's currently devouring three or four ounces of food at a time and making really excellent pincher-grasp progress with self-feeding -- he still needs the support cushion to keep him from slo-o-o-w-ly pitching forwards and off to the side. Being that this is not, after all, my first rodeo, I've been almost fanatically determined to not make a thing out of it. Sure,... Read more →