Liam was having an “off” weekend a few weeks ago. Yeah…”off”…we’ll just leave it at that. One of the few tactics that consistently works to redirect his energy when he’s freaking out is to ask him if he wants to help you with something. Doesn’t matter what it is. You could ask him if he wanted to help you amputate your leg with a rusty butter knife and he’d be jazzed to hold the wash rag in your mouth steady so you could bite down on it. He can be mid-screaming-fit with tears cascading down his chubby cheeks and if, in the few seconds of silence provided when he has to take a breath, you can quickly sputter, “Hey! Want to help me do laundry?”, he’ll turn on a dime, waterworks and yelling gone, and say in the most pleasant and earnest little voice, “Weem help Mum-Mum!! Weem is a *great* helper!” 

This particular weekend, I was getting ready to color my hair. I had planned to sneak away to the bathroom by myself for half an hour, but sacrificing the rest of the family’s quality of life wasn’t worth that, so I invited Liam along to “help.”

“Hey, Bean! Want to help me color my hair?”

I’m sure this sounded like a much more interesting endeavor to my three-year-old than it actually was and I could tell later that he was somewhat disappointed that I had decided to forego using the rainbow of broken nubs from his Crayola box and had, instead, opted for a bottle of goo in a very suburban shade of brown. Warm Medium Brown, actually. Man. Could there be three more neutral, boring words strung together EVER? They should have just called the shade, “Nice.” Well, it was Nice-N-Easy, so I guess they did in a way. This is getting more depressing the more I write!

Liam was extremely interested in the array of plastic gloves and bottles I removed from the “Nice” box. He looked at me and asked, “What color is Mum-Mum making her hair?” (I’m not sure when this third-person-speak of his will end, but I kind of like it right now. Might be awkward in the 5th grade if he still sounds like Tarzan.)

“Ummm…well, just brown, buddy. I’m actually trying to make the gray hair brown so it all matches.”

He looked at me, confused.

“Some of Mummy’s hair is gray. See?” I pointed to several colorless sprigs but could see that he wasn’t focusing on them. “Um…here,” I said pointing to a more prominent patch of gray at the top of my forehead. I put my finger on my forehead under the white patch .

“See there? What are those?”

Liam studied the area above my finger and sat back down, unimpressed.

“Wrinkles.” He said matter-of-factly.

You. Little. Shit.

Now. Here’s the thing. I don’t think he and I or he and ANYONE have ever had a conversation about wrinkles before. How the fuck did he know to say, ‘wrinkles’?? Are the lines and valleys on my face such that they embody the purest essence of wrinkliness and therefore transcend the normal flow of knowledge and learning, standing on their own as the epitome of “Wrinkle?” He knew without knowing that they were wrinkles. See? Depressing!

On the plus side, I now have at least two things in common with Gandalf, who is awesome. So, there’s that…

These moments. They’re accumulating faster than I can take note of or savor them. They’re the little grooves at the edge of the Interstate that are supposed to keep you awake if you get too close - dozens and dozens, blurring together… shifting and flickering to form an unbroken whole. Together, they create a timeline, stretching out to the vanishing point - in front, and behind.

Stay awake, Da-da.

Of Rockets and the Geneva Convention

For Nate’s second birthday, he received his Most Favorite Toy Ever - The Little Einsteins Pat Pat Rocket. Rocket has a cockpit that opens, a speaker that emits rocket-type noises, and lights on the front that blink in time with these noises. He’s manned by all the Little Einsteins who Nate loves to watch in their various mass-marketed DVD adventures. Each Einstein has been given a single, defining character trait: Leo leads the group, June loves to dance, Quincy plays music, and Annie chain smokes.

Nate gleefully lumbers up and down the hallways in a barely-controlled fall, hunched over Rocket like Quasimodo, with one hand on each of Rocket’s flared back fins. Rocket’s cockpit canopy is prone to pop off a little too easily, and it is slightly beyond his ability to clip back into place. His growing concern over the fact that Rocket is in two pieces is unfortunately coupled with both an inability to fix it himself, and a stubborn insistence to attempt to do so anyway. 

“Doit! Do-EEE! Hep!” he demands, insisting on doing it himself and perplexingly, asking for help at the same time. About every third time he asks for hep, he will accept the hep. He slowly taps the loose canopy over and over against the clip it fits into. He’s like one of those hapless, disoriented beetles that try to mate with discarded beer bottles - there’s a lot of tapping, but no results. Sometimes, he comes tantalizingly close, and I resist the strong urge to simply snatch it from him, click it into place and hand it back. It’s like watching someone with an inner ear problem try to thread a needle in the back of a moving pickup.

His favorite Einstein by far is June, who loves to dance. He calls her “Dooooon!”, and the first few days he had the Einsteins, she went everywhere with him. Dinner, the bathtub… he even took her back to his crib. I’ll let the teeth marks on her head tell their own story. 

Liam also loves Rocket. When things are good, he and Nate take turns, with one watching longingly from the kitchen while the other shambles up and down the hallway. When things are bad, it’s pretty much the same thing, just with more screaming and a sudden spike in slap-fight activity. Liam has to hunch a little further over Rocket, but they both laugh and generally love it.

At night as we get one of them ready for bed, the other is usually at the sink in their bathroom. They’ve both adopted the curious and slightly disturbing practice of waterboarding the Little Einsteins. They each fill their miniature bathroom cups with water, then methodically pour water onto each Einstein’s face before dunking them headfirst into the cups, often leaving them under for extended amounts of time. Even June is not safe from this practice.

Of Tricksiness and Improbable Movements

Liam has stepped up his trickery. For example, we tell him to “Buckle up!” after he climbs into his booster seat, and he appears to be agreeably doing so, and most times, he is. However, we’ve noticed on several occasions that he was simply going through the motions, then hiding the buckles and keeping his arms over his lap. He’s palming the handcuff key.

If he’s supposed to be asleep for his nap, we’ll sometimes hear him jumping from his bed to the floor with all the stealth of a bucketful of bricks. Once, on about the sixth chandelier-shaking landing, Jill interrupted our conversation and said, “Did you know that Liam isn’t asleep? Yeah. He’s upstairs, jumping.”

Sometimes he sits on the side of his room opposite his bed and shakes the radiator pipes. Once, he was doing this, and I walked over downstairs and gave it a good shake back. I heard his footsteps scurry back across the room, where they presumably took him back into his bed and stayed there with him.

One afternoon, I opened the door unexpectedly on him, and caught him sitting on the floor with his blocks. I stared at him, and he stared at me. I struggled to keep my poker face, and he didn’t know which way the wind was going to blow. Finally, he broke the silence.

“Hi Da-da. Liam just woke up!” he lied cheerfully.

Another day I walked in to find him sitting in the middle of his bed, sucking his thumb. All his curtains had been pulled down, so I asked him how that had happened.

“Nay-nay did it. Nay pulled down all those curtains.” he replied.

“Really? So Nate got out of his crib, came into your room, pulled down all your curtains, then went back into his room and got back into his crib? Nate did that?”

He took his thumb out of his mouth, raised his eyebrows, and responded, “Naynay pooped in Weem’s diaper too.”

Of the Inherent Hilarity of Tooting

Sometimes, when I’m changing Liam, he tries to toot on Da-da. I’ll yell, “Don’t toot on Da-da! NO toots!”, and he’ll strain to the point that I worry he’s going to give himself a hemorrhoid. It probably doesn’t help that I’m either laughing or trying not to laugh the entire time. You try not to laugh while he’s grunting and pushing, and his ass looks like a dry-heaving starfish. Once, he succeeded in blowing the diaper cream completely off my finger, like he was blowing out a birthday candle. The lad got me.

Of Being Fat and Reaching New Gastrointestinal Milestones

Note to Sam: Sam, you’re fat. Maybe the heftiest of them all. Like, 97th-Percentile-Tubby. By definition, that means that you’ve got bigger tits than 96 out of every 100 other babies who were born when you were. Seriously, where are your wrists, dude? You look like a pack of Ball Park Franks. I bet you’d be delicious to an alligator - all chewy and pink - nothing to spit out. Of course, he’d have to get you after a diaper-change, because damn. Now that you’re on solid food, you’ve soared to new levels. You can spackle up some serious adult-sized stanky. And you smile when you do it. Of course, you smile at almost everything. And I don’t care if you annihilate a diaper or have dimples where bones should be. I love you, baby.

Of Sleeping and Waking

Sometimes, Liam does sleep when he’s supposed to, and he wakes up pretty cute and with a head and eyelids two sizes too large. Several weeks ago, he rubbed his eyes and told me, “Yellow egg is sleepy and his mouth looks like a pentagon.”

I sat on his bed next to him and listened intently.

“Purple egg isn’t sleepy; he’s just waking up slow.”

I wasn’t sure exactly what this meant, but I appreciated the number of words that were in each sentence, and how earnestly the information was relayed to me. I don’t know if it was that he was half-asleep, or half-awake. Maybe that he’s half-and-a-three.

Nate sometimes wakes up and cries in the middle of the night. One of us will go upstairs and hold him in the cushy Pottery Barn rocker until he calms back down. If you try to put him back into his crib too early, he’ll hug you like a Spider Monkey - a Spider Monkey that can say “No! Bed!”

Sam wakes up several times a night, or so I’m told.

Of Easter

All three boys were visited by the Easter Bunny, and he hid many eggs and baskets. Nate delighted in finding his behind the hallway door, and sat down immediately to explore its many unexpected treasures. We led Liam directly to his and basically pushed him towards it. Visibly agitated, he declared “No Easter Bask-KEEET!”, thereby continuing his unbroken streak of acting in completely the opposite way that one would guess a three year old would act. Sam sat in his highchair and smiled. They all got stacking robots, spinning tops, and sugared snacks. Sam also got a helicopter that was immediately commandeered by his brothers, which caused him to smile again.

Of These Scenes I Don’t Want to Forget

Nate, hearing any unfamiliar noise, dropping whatever he’s doing, finding one of us, then tapping his ear while asking repeatedly, “Whazzat? Whazzat, Da-da? Whazzat Muh-mum?” until we tell him whazzat is.

Me, trying to wash Liam’s hair while he screams, and eventually just stepping back and letting Jill take over. Then listening to her calmly talking to him, involving him in the process, and finishing the job as he looked up and actually smiled at imaginary airplanes.

Liam and Nate, dragging their disconnected swings back under the swingset and collapsing into them, understanding the ‘what’ and the ‘where’, if not quite the ‘how’. Then, with little hands firmly grasping the sides of each swing, sitting expectantly and waiting for something to start, like the guy in the old Memorex ads. Me, walking over to them sitting there in the grass like two broken puppets, and Nate looking up and saying, “Hi Da-Da!.”

Jill, under her umbrella in the backyard, kneeling and picking up toys in the rain.

Me, standing at the kitchen window, feeling the coolness of the glass, and watching Jill picking up toys in the rain. And appreciating how lucky I am. How lucky I am to have found my perfect accomplice. How lucky I am to be holding firmly onto her hand as we’re pulled along like two kids in a crowded funhouse through this uncharted adventure. And how lucky I am to be dry, and inside, instead of out there, picking up toys.

Sunday mornings that smell like cinnamon bagels, sound like slamming screen doors, and look like small boys running through tall grass.

Sam, giving us blueberry raspberries.

Of Seizing the Moment

But too much time has now passed between when I observed these things, and when I found the time to write about them. Most of these things are already done and gone. They were really gone the moment they occurred, and trying to capture them here is like trying to catch moonlight with a butterfly net. They are as tinny echos, chasing each other down hallways like carefree footsteps and pealing up through the unfolding leaves of spring, like laughter from a sandbox.

Rocket’s canopy is now in a different room than Rocket, and Nate doesn’t seem concerned to see one without the other. This morning, I saw June laying forgotten in a plastic pumpkin, alone but for Leo, group leader. I can’t remember exactly when I last saw Nate with either of them. He’s moving on.

Liam no longer needs to resort to slight of lap to escape from his booster, as with a little effort, he can defeat his buckles even when clipped. And when he does buckle up, he clips in not around a diaper, but around a Pull-up. So there’s no need for changing tables or diaper cream. He’s moving on.

It’s also stopped raining, so Jill no longer needs her umbrella.

Thankfully, Sam is still pretty fat.

For the moment.

One thing you should know about Liam is that he suffers from multiple personality disorder. Among the roughly 37 that we have documented, there are two overriding personalities under which all the others fall. There is Han Solo Liam and there is Dynamic Duo Liam. Solo Liam is way cool, laid back, chilled out, melllllloooow. He listens to Dark Side of the Moon and drives a VW Bus to preschool. Duo Liam is an angsty, whiny, control freak. He drinks way too much coffee and flosses with barbed wire. The difference between the two? The absence/presence of Liam’s perpetually airborne little brother, Nate. (The other little brother, the 20 lb. eating machine called Sam, does not have this effect on Liam. Yet.)

In addition to the assholish behavior mentioned above, Duo Liam also thrives on excluding Nate from things. Bill and I have been making it a point to take the boys out with us separately so that they can spread their turkey wings a little. They’re silly outings, errands really…Safeway, CVS, Wal-Mart. But even more than the adventure, Liam loves telling me about how Nate isn’t with us. ”Just Weem and Mum-Mum are going! Not Nate. Nate’s not going. Just Weem!” He’ll roll around in the idea and scrub the words all over himself again and again. He had a similar reaction last week when I tried explaining to the boys the importance of cooperation, especially during the day when the ratio of crazy parent to crazy kid is 1:3. “We need to help each other and work as a team. OK? Do you think you can do that for Mummy?” Nate beamed his sunny little face my way while Liam crossed his arms over his chest and said, “NO! No Nate is team! Just Weem is team!!” Um-hmm. There’s no L’i'am in ‘team,’ apparently.

So, when we took away Liam’s diapers cold turkey yesterday and began potty training, I used his love of excluding Nate to make the potty look like a delicious indulgence that NATE CAN’T HAVE! And, yes, I did consider the dozen or so ways this manipulation might come back to kick me in the junk in the future. But, having exhausted all logical arguments for not crapping your pants, I opted for the unconventional approach. ”The potty is just for Liam. Not Nate. Nate’s not potty trained like Liam will be.” And, it TOTALLY FREAKIN’ WORKED!

However, while my deception was well crafted and thorough, I failed to be specific enough in my instruction. What I said was, “I have to put Nate down for his nap. I’ll be back in 10 minutes. If you need to poop while Mum-Mum is gone, please try to put your poop in the potty.” What I should have said was, “I have to put Nate down for his nap. I’ll be back in 10 minutes. If you need to poop while Mum-Mum is gone, please try to put your poop in the potty…and if you do? LEAVE! IT! THERE!” 

So subdued for one who just dipped his toys in a shit fondue pot.

…dipped his toys and his leg.

W! WTF!

I think this ‘Little People’ was supposed to be holding #2. 

It was almost worth the gagging to say, ”EAT SHIT, ELMO!!”

Because Liam is a path-of-greatest-resistance child, we’ve had to conquer most of his developmental milestones the hard way. Don’t misunderstand. We have always tried the “easy” way first. But, Liam laughed heartily at the normal, approved methods of sleep training, weaning from the breast, weaning from the bottle, and learning to walk, which he begrudgingly did at SEVENTEEN MONTHS of age. Finally, one day he just sighed and rolled his eyes at us, toddled across the floor, and then sat back down to finish the advanced trig problem he’d been working on before we had the nerve to bother him with the whole walking upright crap.

There is no middle ground for Liam. He is either angelic or rotten. Extremely advanced or extremely delayed. Poor kid got a double whammy of this genetic cocktail from both Bill and me. We inevitably fall on either the far left or far right of any given bell curve. Ability to spike a volleyball into an opponent’s face rendering them an unconscious heap on the floor? Jill, far right. Bill, far left. Ability to balance an entire check book in one’s head…in 12 seconds? Bill, far right. Jill, far left. I’m not sure who in his family Bill blames for passing this characteristic along to him, but I blame my Dad for mine. 100%. Mum, you’re totally off the hook for this one. Many times I’ve heard the quote my exasperated Papa Summerville uttered to my then teenage Dad; “Nothing in moderation! Not a GOD!-DAMN! thing in moderation!!” And so it goes two generations later…

For the last year, we have been trying to achieve the mother of all milestones with Liam. Potty training. Yes, I know it’s harder to train boys. Yes, I know they’ll go when they’re ready. Yes, I’ve been in enough chat rooms and on enough message boards to know that some parents who didn’t have a hard time potty training will use it as a platform to feel superior to those of us who are elbow deep in poopy SIZE 7 Pampers Cruisers. (41+ lbs., folks!! If not for those, he’d be sporting Depends.)

About a year ago, Liam gave us the smallest glimmer of hope that we would not have to travel the path lined with shattered beer bottles to get him potty trained. He put pee-pee in the potty for the first time! Bill and I did a wildly unattractive celebratory dance that culminated with me dumping the potty over Bill’s unsuspecting noggin like the head coach of the winning football team getting a Gatorade shower. Positive reinforcement and all that rot. Liam could not have been more horrified that we were happy and praising him. “NO MUM-MUM SAY, ‘GOOD JOB!’ AHHHHHHHHHHHHHARRRRRRRRAHHHHHHHHHHHHH! NO DAH-DAH SAY IT!!!”

From that moment on, he would have nothing to do with the potty. For a year we tried all of the normal potty training tactics and got nowhere. So, this morning, we went cold turkey. No more diapers, period. Liam will strut around naked from the waist down until he’s successfully using the potty and we’ll use pull-ups for naps and at night. I very calmly explained to Liam that we were saying ‘bye-bye’ to his diapers, that he was a big boy and it was time to start using the potty. He wasn’t on board with that idea and whimpered pitifully, trying desperately to convince me to let him keep his soggy, overnight diaper on. I gently told him ‘no’ and then pried off the last diaper that our eldest son will ever wear and put it in the diaper pail.

Thus begins Day 1 of Potty Training Boot Camp. Buckle-up, buttercup. This is going to be a horror show and I’m going to share it all with you.

“Where is Mum-Mum’s nose?”

Liam’s chubby index finger sneaks out from under his sheets and gently pokes the tip of my nose. His skin smells like apple juice and talcum powder. He smiles at me from behind his thumb which is nestled in the roof of his mouth. (Somewhere, our future orthodontist cackles and orders up a Space Shuttle.)

This is my favorite time of day with Liam. He’s peaceful and unguarded, personality #17. There are no little brothers lurking about threatening to steal his toys or my attention. He’s reclined and vulnerable on his bed, little boy armor checked at the door because it would be far too exhausting to bring so much stubbornness and fight to bed after having lugged it around all day.

Although he can be a wildly difficult creature, I secretly love that he is such a little bull. I see something of myself in his fire and anger. Controlling it without crushing it will be tricky as he grows up. While the fire/anger gene it is not my most admirable or desirable component, it is a component with strength.

“Where are Mum-Mum’s cheeks?”

He reaches out with both hands, presses the flats of his palms against my cheeks, and gently squeezes. I look like a fish. He smiles again and his eyes tell me that he’s in on the game…that he knows that I know that he knows all of these answers. It’s a game we’ve played with him since before he could speak. It’s probably a bit indulgent to have continued on with it for this long, but it’s familiar to Liam and helps him power down for the night.

“Where are Mum-Mum’s eyes?”

His index finger lands on the thin, blue-from-lack-of-sleep skin beneath my eyes. He studies me and I decide to change the game slightly.

“Hey Bean…what color are Mum-Mum’s eyes?”

Liam leans in. He takes his time inspecting me and finally snuggles back into his pillows.

“Ummm… Mum-Mum’s eyes are blue. And, white.”

Indeed. A surprised laugh bubbles out of me. I laugh at how unexpected his answer is as well as how accurate it is. I kiss him. This is my favorite time of day with Liam.

Today is Jill’s first day going it alone with all three boys. I respect her talent and patience. Just absorbing the full brunt of Son1 and Son2 is enough to crumble statues… so I can’t imagine dealing with them while simultaneously dealing with Son3, who requires one’s full attention plus fourteen. It’s like an advanced geometry problem with no answer.

A circular area with a diameter of no sleep is bordered by uniform screaming. It contains six missing couch cushions, eleven insurmountable tantrums, four plastic bowls of varying and shifting degrees of importance, and one incontinent Basset Hound. If the area around the shunned pacifier is sixty square bath times, find its width in diapers. (Values = Liam, Nate, Sam; 3 boys > 1 adult).

Perform all math in your head as you allow a piggybacking musketeer with a mouthful of turned corn to repeatedly punch you in the neck and fire a flintlock muzzleloader into a bathtub filled with brass cymbals. Clean up. Fix food. Clean up. Pass out. Wake up four times before you wake up.

Okay, so I guess it’s more like an advanced geometry problem with corn, gunplay, and the odd musketeer. I didn’t see that coming. Either way, Jill’s ears are ringing, food is involved, and she’s getting hit in the neck a lot.