My Child Screams; I'm Trying Not To.

Time for me to come clean.

There was a time when love was blind
And the world was a song
And the song was exciting
There was a time
Then it all went wrong . . .

Wait . . . that's not my confession--that's the introduction to "I Dreamed a Dream" from Les Miserables. Not quite the same, but sort of. What I meant to say was:

There was a time when kids would scream
and it meant they were spoiled
and their parents were slacking
There was a time
Then my thoughts were foiled!

Because really, I used to be one of those young people with no parenting experience who would hear the wailings of toddlers and small children and think, "My goodness! Can't you make them stop?" And worse, beyond thinking that, I honestly believed it. I truly thought that about 80% of the time parents could make their children stop screaming by sheer force of excellent parenting.

It is with humble heart (and a screaming toddler) that I approach the internet to say I'm sorry. And wrong. And tired of failing to understand what's wrong. Because everything. Warrants. A scream.

Now, please don't gloat. (You're doing it anyway! I can feel your smugness over the network connection, now stop it!) We all learn different things at different times, and I was just slower on this one, all right? Besides, think back to when it was you, be the bigger person, and find it in your soul to pity me. Recall the first--no matter how early or late in your child's life--time you realized that your "precious sweetums" (No, of course I don't call my kid that, but if YOU do, that's lovely!) was not actually a full-blooded angel. Not because angels don't have blood, but because your child was not behaving in an angelic manner. It's a disappointing moment, but you know, it happens.

The time will come when the adorable larva that once rolled on your floor will take his or her first steps, and you will think it is sweet--until those steps lead them up to the kitchen table at every opportunity of unsupervision. Soft gurgles and laughs will turn to high-pitched shrieks of anger and a mischievous cackle that you just don't trust. And as these--and other just as horrifying--things happen, you will ask yourself what it is you're doing wrong or what more you could do to stop these uncivilized behaviors. I hope at this point you will come to the same conclusion that I have: you can do nothing. I am only half kidding.

Sure, you can do the normal parent stuff--the stuff you're probably already doing--but when it comes down to it, just realize that most of this is happening not because you're a bad parent. It's simply happening because you're raising a precocious 15 month old who thinks the terrible twos sound like great fun. Of course, I can really only speak from my own experience, so maybe your child really is spoiled (please read this with a good-natured tone and smile injected), but I think when your child's personality outgrows his or her language development, you're bound to experience some frustration.

Shall I add insult to injury? The other day we were watching Super Why!--which we sometimes do when the day is long and the sounds of despair are many--and we caught an episode in which the Super Readers' friend, Wolfie (Wolfy? Wolfee? I'm sticking with Wolfie.), kept growling because he was upset. The moral of that story was "Use your words!" Which is great, except, guess what? Sporadic vocabulary of maybe three words--none of which is "words." So, that's awesome.

At least we're to the point now where I can tell she understands some of my words. That's a start, right? I was extremely excited the day I told Melody "No!" and she understood. Little did I realize how much more frustrating it is to be heard, understood, and ignored than it is to simply not be understood. With limited communication skills and even less patience, what's a mom to do?

Hang in there, I guess. Enjoy the screams from bed that mean "I'm awake and ready to come out!" Bask in the screams from the other side of the bathroom door that mean "MOM! What are you doing in there, and why can't I come in?" Revel in the screams that mean "That thing you're doing looks fun! Let me do it with you. And climb on you. And throw books in your face. And stick my finger up your nose, and . . . Mom, why aren't we doing that fun thing anymore, mom . . . ?" and all the other cryptic screams that set your teeth to gritting.

But better than that, enjoy (wholly and sincerely) the moments when she does heed your commands. When she throws her arms around you and hugs you so tightly that you wish your day would stop and all afternoon could just be little arms, a head on your shoulder, and happy smiles. Meditate upon watching her set out her play dishes, fold her arms, and "pray" before "eating." Savor seeing her lay down on the floor next to her daddy and snuggle her head into the crook of his elbow. Pay attention to the sweet moments of joy and let them blur the memory of tantrums. In doing so, you may become aware of just how much more frequently the cute and well-behaved make an appearance than the out-of-control and bratty. To quote Pollyanna (who was not actually quoting Abraham Lincoln), "When you look for the bad in mankind expecting to find it, you surely will." Now, take that, invert it, and don't be too hard on yourself: you're raising quite an enjoyable child.

Cat-astrophe: The Sequel

In which we adopt a ghost cat.

In the past week, I've apologized to my husband many times for adopting a cat. I've apologized for taking him by surprise. I've apologized because it wasn't a kitten. I've apologized because it was so loud. I've apologized because we had to keep it inside for a bit, that it somehow found its way into our vents, and that it showed up on our bed last night when we had locked it in the basement. Well, I am now done apologizing for our cat. Mostly because I think it has made its permanent escape.

Guys, I don't even know what to say anymore. Somehow I adopted either a feline ghost or Harry Houdini's kitty incarnate. How do these things happen?

WELL, let's rewind and see. *Whirring of a VHS tape* (if you don't know what that is, I've included a link to a historical site that can explain it) and, roll film:

Me: “Blah, blah, blah . . . pick up a cat . . . ?”

Alex: “WHAT?”

And later . . .

Me: “We should probably keep it in the house until it gets used to us. Just in the back room/basement area. It will be fine. What could happen?”

I now cut to an excerpt from Willa Cat-her's diary.

Day 6: IT'S A TRAP! Having fully explored my limited spaces, I approach madness. I don't think they can hear my cries. If only I could get closer, perhaps then they would listen.

The long winding tunnels have brought me closer to the humans. I hear them, and know that they must hear me, but they still ignore me. I have formulated a plan that will get me out of here. This will be my last entry, as tonight while they are sleeping, I will make my escape. I think for good measure I will stop by and jump on them on my way out. Vengeance is mine . . .

So, as you can see, our cat was no ordinary cat. We fed it, gave it water, brushed it, and pondered the best way to get it to stay with us when we let it outside. We had plans to start feeding it on the back porch today and transition it to the great outdoors. Unfortunately, once we became aware that the scheming demon had somehow found her way into and out of our duct work, we knew we would have to change our plans . However, we didn't want to put her out at night, so we went to bed hoping that she would be okay until the morning. My last comment was, “I think she'll come out when we go to bed and turn off the lights. I mean, there won't be any sound or light to attract her anymore. She'll come out.”

And she did—just not the way she went in.

We had been asleep maybe an hour when we were awakened by the loud mewing that doesn't usually come from our closet. I was ready to chalk it up to a crazy dream I was having when Alex jumped up saying “SHE'S ON OUR BED!”

He was mad. And as he chased the cat, she ran into to Melody's room and woke her up, which just made things worse. And thus it was that once Alex got his hands on the cat, she went unceremoniously out the front door along along with all the psychology with which we had planned to gain her trust. It was, as this entire cat and mouse business has been, quite unfortunate.

This morning, in a final effort to win our kitty's affections—if she's not already back with her previous family—we put her towel, food, and water out on our back porch. We keep checking for her, but I think she's long gone. If that's the case, I don't think we'll play this game again until it's kitten season. That leaves us lots of time to think about what we've done.

The moral of this story is:

Don't spontaneously adopt a full grown cat as a means of getting rid of mice. You will only be astonished at just how easily cats (and therefore mice) can find their way around the inside of your house.

Darn cat.

Rice and Mice: A Cat-astrophe

Love can drive people to do some pretty crazy things. So can fear of mice. The first is why I got married and had a baby; the second is the reason I got a cat.

Yeah, that's right: a cat.

At the risk of offending—something I'm getting pretty good at doing—the cat people among you, I have always been a full-blooded dog person. (When faced with the question of dog or cat. Wider options allowing, I'm more of a fish person, actually.) I won't say I swerve to hit cats or go out of my way to kick them, but I just don't care for their attitudes. Also, their sixth sense that allows them to find and bother people who don't like cats has always riled me. But, desperate times call for desperate measures.

We came home Sunday night and opened our kitchen cupboard looking for some dinner. What we found was a mouse stealing our rice. We'd known we had a mouse in our wall, but this made it all very real. I flipped. Alex kept telling me to calm down, but all I could think of were its little feet scurrying around and spreading diseases through my cupboard. I sat in the farthest room from the mouse's last known position and refused to believe that there was a mouse in my house. (There's nothing cute about mouses in houses, by the way. Dr. Seuss, I WOULD NOT WOULD NOT do anything with a mouse!)

After that, I got mad. How dare that mouse eat our food and live in our house? If only we had caught it before it discovered sustenance! Was it that my house wasn't clean enough? I would have cleaned my house better if it would have kept away rodents. And then I just got sad because I knew I could have kept my house cleaner (although, admittedly, this probably would have happened regardless of how clean things were). And as I sat and thought about all of the grossness I would now have to scrub away due to our furry little friend with the scurrying feet, I have to admit—I sort of shut down.

Once I had cycled through the first four stages of loss and grief, I was finally able to accept that we had a mouse in the house. It took at least a few hours of refusing to go into the kitchen for fear that . . . well, okay, I don't know exactly what I was afraid of, but I think it involved rodents infected with the Hantavirus jumping out of my cupboard and attacking me. Looking back now, I can see that was ridiculous, but it was real to me at the time. I also think it was made worse by the fact that Alex told me we were dealing with a black rat at least eight inches long not counting the tail.

This was an interesting experiment in psychology, because when I saw that mouse in our cupboard it was just that—a mouse. And it was brown. But after hearing that it was a large black rat, I started to think back and “remember” just how wrong I was. Yes, of course. It WAS black. And now that I think of it, it did resemble the rat from Lady and the Tramp (which, by the way, just caused me a bit of anxiety after looking at pictures of said rat). How did I not see it before?

Well, we (and by we, I mean Alex) set up a trap and caught the pest by the next morning. And when Alex showed me the little brown mouse, I panicked because WE DIDN'T GET HIM!

Alex assured me that we had. But we didn't! The one we saw was bigger and black; it was a rat! Wasn't it?

Nope. It wasn't. To quote Alex, “I only told you that because you were being . . . lame. I wanted to justify your fear.” Or feed it. Pfft. I had totally reprogrammed my memory to see what I thought I saw. Which totally happens a lot. See here for more on that.

Most of the time, I'm fine with pests. Spiders? I don't like them, but I can deal. Normal sized non-venomous snakes? I'd be a bit freaked out if one randomly found itself in my kitchen cabinet, but I feel like I would feel okay with removing it. Probably with my bare hands. But mice? Not okay. I think, as I've mentioned once or twice, it's their diseases and their scurrying little feet. Because they can scurry right up your leg and infect you with Hanta before you can say Jack Robinson. Gross.

Anyway, in between listening to just how disgusting I found rodents, my mom suggested some ways we could take care of this problem: Seal up our house, trap them, and get something that would eat them. I thought maybe we'd set a snake loose in our attic—or better yet—invest in a Basilisk, but after weighing the pros (no mice) and cons (finding one, explaining it to our guests—and in the case of the basilisk, possible petrification) of both these animals, my mom said she was actually meaning a cat. Hmm . . . a cat. It could work.

So, the very next day I was all over the local Facebook yard sale pages (like a mouse all over rice—too soon, too soon!) in order to find a cat. Then, I called Alex to ask if he could pick it up on his way home from work. He was a *little* surprised since it had only come up once, and we had interpreted the brief discussion completely differently. I came away thinking we had decided to get a cat, but he came away totally unsuspecting. And, now we have a cat. I like to think of it as payback for the whole rat incident.

We've been thinking about what to name it since it doesn't answer to its previous “name,” Oreo. I suggested that we name our cat Stevens (Hehe, Cat Stevens . . . never mind), but we actually think it's a girl. Which is why I just decided we could name her Willa Cat-her instead. But don't tell Alex, he is, once again, totally unsuspecting.

I guess that scores two points for cats: 1. They catch and eat mice. 2. You can name them anything--even things you wouldn't name your children--and they don't know any better.

The Drama of Clothes-Cleaning

Days of Our Lives Laundry

I have a problem with laundry. I didn't used to think it would ever come to this—I mean, how hard is it to gather the clothes, sort them, then put them in the washer and dryer?

Turns out it's pretty tough.

My perceptions of laundry changed when we lived in an apartment without a washer and dryer. This necessitated a trip to the laundromat down the street. Our relationship with the laundromat was complicated. As one who was used to being able to run downstairs and throw in a load of laundry late the night I realized that I didn't have clean underwear for the morrow, it was a difficult adjustment. It was like a story problem from Hades: “Alex has 4 remaining pairs of socks, Malinda has 2 pairs of underwear, and Alex has 1 pair of clean work pants. If Malinda works immediately after classes Tuesday through Thursday and Alex has the car from 3 to 11 Monday through Saturday, which is the best day and time to do the laundry, accounting for the fact that Malinda has a major paper due next Tuesday?”

The answer of course was “D. None of the above. Malinda and Alex join a nudist colony and never have to worry about laundry again.” If only. (Just kidding. Obviously, I'm just kidding.)

As we navigated the complex issues of school, work, and laundry, we lost two pairs of pants to the laundry gremlins who apparently weren't getting enough socks and started gnawing on our jeans as a result. After getting home to discover that one of Alex's brand new pairs of pants had been torn across the back by the machines, I was determined to switch laundromats. When I went the extra block to try a different laundromat, though, I was scared off by the lack of people and maintenance that the place had seen. When my first thoughts were “This place is kind of ghetto,” and “Nobody would hear my screams or find my body if I were to be murdered here,” I immediately packed up my clothes and went back to my laundromat of origin. At least if I died there, somebody would find my body before hope to catch the perpetrator had expired.

We didn't lose any more clothes to the fierce ogres in the dryer after that. Nor did I feel threatened while doing my laundry. It was win-win.

Shortly thereafter, we moved to a new apartment that had a washer and dryer, and I thought: “Doing laundry will be a piece of cake now.” But it wasn't, because there's always something. For instance, now when I gather laundry, I have to gather it from two places, instead of just one. So rough.

I've actually discovered that my family and I tend to dress in certain colors for certain times of the week. This isn't because we try to match, or because I declare “turquoise Tuesdays” or “fuchsia Fridays.” It just sort of naturally happens because we wear what's clean—and it rarely happens that all of our colors are clean at the same time. I read in an article about dejunking yesterday that this [not doing your laundry for awhile] can be great way to know what clothes to get rid of: you simply wait to do laundry until someone complains that they “don't have anything to wear,” and then get rid of the other clothes that are still sitting in closets because they probably aren't being worn anyway. I'm really good at employing this strategy—the not doing laundry part, at least—I just never get around to the dejunk the closet part. Probably because I always seem to be doing laundry.

I think the thing about laundry is that it requires commitment to see a load from the washer all the way to its final folded form in drawers. There are so many chances to be interrupted in the middle, and then you are forever trapped in the spin cycles of “I'd better rewash this because I forgot it was sitting here in the washer growing mildew,” and the “We've officially lost track of which pile is clean and which is dirty. Time to do laundry and start it all again!”

It's time to break the cycle. There has to be a way that my family can wear our blues with our reds without advance notice—or is that “Having our cake and eating it, too?” I can only wonder. And since my family will be forever dirtying clothes, I will presumably have plenty of time to ponder this question and search for its answers. Unless we all become nudists. (Still kidding! Obviously still kidding.) At any rate, I declare today to be “fuchsia Friday” as a sign of solidarity among those of us struggling with the laundry blues.

Umm . . . Excuse Me, But Didn't You Mean to Give Me Some of That Banana Bread?

You already know I'm an awkward person. I mean, I already know I'm an awkward person, and I would think you'd have gathered as much from my blog entries. It's okay, though. There are other people in the world who share my awkwardness. College freshman and math majors, for instance. In fact, I met a great college freshman/math major who was awkward just the other day. It was great, and my day was subsequently brightened as a result of this encounter.

I was in my yard weeding a couple evenings ago. (I weed a little--almost--every day. I estimate that at my current rate, the northeast corner of my driveway will be weed free by about the time it freezes and all the weeds die. Ah, the circle of life.) In the middle of my weeding, I heard someone approach from across the street as a male voice said, “I haven't yet met my neighbors.” I turned to see who it was and was able to identify the voice's owner as a freshman even before he introduced himself. He was carrying two small loaves of what appeared to be banana bread wrapped in Saran wrap.

He told me his name was Josh (name may have been forgotten and then made up to protect the innocent, but I'm not actually sure) and asked if I was a student at SUU and I told him that I wasn't, but my husband was.

I think that's when things started to go wrong.

There was a slightly long pause in which I expected him to hand over the banana bread and high-tail it back to his apartment across the street, “the downstairs, but not the basement,” as he had told me just before he asked if I was a student. However, he kept his banana bread and stayed. So, I attempted to advance the conversation:

“You're a student? At SUU?”

“Yeah, yeah, I am.”

“What's your major?”

“Math.”

I paused and realized that if there was damage to do it was already done. “My husband is a math major. Do you have an emphasis?”

“Yeah, actuarial science.”

“Oh, really, that was his degree, before he changed it!”

So, we discussed why Alex is no longer interested in an actuarial job for a short time and then came to another pause. And I again expected to part ways, each of us holding a loaf of banana bread. Again, I was wrong.

“So, Malinda, right? Well, it was nice to meet you!”

“And you . . . , I forgot your name, sorry!”

“Josh.”

“Right, Josh. Good to meet you. See you later!”

“Right, bye.”

And then he walked off with my banana bread.

Okay, so maybe that's a bit presumptuous of me to call it “my banana bread,” but every other time I've had a neighbor introduce themselves while holding goodies, I have come out with some in the end. Also, every time I've approached a neighbor with a treat, I've given it to them. Maybe we're all doing this wrong?

So, after he left with both loaves of bread, I just stood there. . . until he was out of earshot. Then I laughed.

I mean, it was funny to me. Why make the effort to come over to meet your neighbors with bread in tow and then take it home with you? Perhaps it was as Alex suggested as he interrupted my story (before I had gotten to the punchline—he thought he was so funny) and Josh said, “Well, I really intended this bread for unmarried people,” and went home. I could understand that. If you're using your “Getting to know the neighbors routine” to pick us on girls, it can be a real downer to encounter an old married woman. You probably don't want to waste your banana bread on her—it takes time to make, and you aren't getting any less single! I get it. And having been in the single realm, I could see it being true for many guys. Hence, the laugh.

But maybe—and I'm gonna go with this option—he was just a little flustered and not used to how these situations go. It's his first time away from home and he probably hasn't done this a lot. Maybe he's a new high school graduate who's still acclimating to the concept of meeting girls—or a returned missionary. Who is also still acclimating to the concept of meeting girls. In any case, I don't think I was intentionally denied my right to getting-to-know-you goodies. (That's a right, right? “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness [in the form of baked goods from new neighbors]”?) I think it was just a case of social ineptitude. And I salute that, because I have certainly had my share of those moments. My only hope is that I, like Josh, have given those on the receiving end of my blunders a laugh, even when I may have forgotten the other reason I came.