When he insisted that he had to go watch a show in the den we told him that he couldn’t until he ate 2 bites of his delicious Captn Crunch which was peacefully waiting on the table, dying to be eaten. After much whining, pleading and negotiating he finally caved and ate his 2 bites of his cereal. I guess what was supposed to be 2 spoonfuls to us was 2 single pieces of cereal.

Kudos to the kid for outsmarting his parents. 2 is 2 and we had to give him that.

Let me catch you up on this past year. Nothing too exciting except for the fact that we got pregnant and are due with our new baby girl within days. I have had a pretty uneventful pregnancy and with baby J, nothing stays boring or calm. I will be referring to him as ‘the kid’ as opposed to ‘baby J’ because it is just going to get way too confusing and with preggo brain and mommy brain (which is worse than preggo brain) I am going to get the kids confused. Not that one being a tiny, itty bitty, crying baby girl and a 40 pound non-stop, loud and very opinionated toddler boy would make me rememeber the difference.

So please stick around. If I can dig up some dirt from the past few months, get it down in writing. Happy to see you.

“Hi! What a doin?” he will say with one hand and then the conversation starts and usually finishes with his hand trying to chomp on yours. That’s when the fun ends and I tell him he has to stop or the hand-eating monster is going to come and chew his fingers off one by one.

One afternoon he decided that his hand puppets needed to have clothes so he dug out a pair of tube socks that are too small for his feet and had 2 green stripes at the top. He places one on one hand and starts to talk with it. Cute, right? Then he wants the other hand covered so they both can talk to each other while they are dressed. So I give up and I leave him in his room to talk to himself, or to his hands. He falls asleep with his hands well dressed and when I go in there to wake him, he pops up and started to have a conversation between the two hands again. I figured the nap just interfered with the conversation.

He kept taking the socks off and putting them back on. This is a difficult thing if you have never been successful with putting socks in the proper place, your feet. He insisted he do it with no help. I thought this was a good distraction and started to strip him of his naptime shorts and diaper, which, by the way, was very full. I start to get ready for the rest of the day and try to dig out a pair of shorts and look for a clean diaper. I also had some laundry to organize in his room so I start to do that and then suddenly I hear in a loud and very proud voice, “IT FITS!” I start to talk to him as I am preoccupied with the laundry and other adult concerns and I say things like ‘That’s great!’ and ‘Good job!’ and ‘Can you do it again?’ He then starts to giggle and says it again “It fits, Mommy!” My curiosity gets the better of me at this point because socks on hands are not so funny anymore. We know he can do that. So I turn towards him and he says it again while looking down at the sock. “It fits, Mommy.”

“Um, yea I see that. It’s a perfect fit!” {on your penis!} And he laughs hysterically. I take it and put it straight into the hamper. I couldn’t stop laughing myself.

“Thats a vegetable, right?”

He now cuddles with his Simba doll that sports his Mets T-shirt because it doesn’t fit him anymore. Every night I come into his room to adjust his blanket and make sure both of them are properly covered and centered on the bed. I push baby J’s hair back and give him a gentle kiss and tell him I love him. Lately he will talk in his sleep and say ‘Hi, mommy. What a doing?’ and I will just simply respond ‘Tucking you in and giving you a kiss, baby.’ He doesn’t open his eyes or get up. He will just turn over and go back to his good nights sleep.

This has to be the best part of my every day. I cannot go to sleep without this routine. Without saying a peaceful goodnight to my baby. This is a moment that makes you forget how difficult it is to be a parent. How exhausted you are every day. It just makes you feel love that you just never thought you could feel.

“You can keep your shorts on as long as I put on a clean diaper”
“No new diaper”
“Mommy doesn’t want you to pee-pee on the floor. We need to wear a new diaper”
“No pee-pee da foor”
“Honeybear, we have to wear a diaper to go eat our breakfast”
“NO”
“I promise that you can wear your sleepy shorts…”
“Uh-oh!” {with a serious look on his face}
“What?”
“Pee-pee on da foor, Mommay.”

Yup! There it was. He walked over to me and pointed to the wet spot he had created on his beautiful carpeting. He immediately let me put a diaper on after that. I guess it was either a diaper or I make him sit on the potty all day.

R is watching this display of emotion with me for many minutes. He looks at me square in the eye and says, “Thank God I get to go back to work tomorrow!”

The beast I found sitting silently in my laundry room was a big old nasty spider. It was sitting facing downward on a nicely folded blanket that I use to curl up infront of the TV with. I know it was waiting for me to get closer and attack me. That thing was vicious and absolutely ready to invade my home. It probably was calling its troops as I looked at it and screamed at the top of my lungs and backed away from it without taking my eyes off of it. The husband jumped up from his computer desk so fast it was amazing. He reacted as if I lit my hair on fire and couldn’t stifle the flames.

He asks me what happened and I tell him there is a humongous spider in there. I am jumping and cringing and getting all the heeby jeebies just telling him about it. He looks into the laundry room and he immediately freaks out. I am sure he was expecting one of those typical spiders that you find around the house that are not as scary in comparison and seem pretty easy to get rid of. But, nope. This one was big and hairy and grosser than the scene where Ben Stiiller gets his face squished on a hairy mans sweaty chest in “Along Came Polly”.

I immediately run for the camera to take a picture of it. The husband runs to the garage to find something to catch it with. It’s amazing how different our first instincts are. I go to take a picture while R digs for a tree trimmer and a clear box. R’s intentions were quite obvious but I had to get this picture. I had to show my bug expert and ask her what it was and WHY THE HELL WAS IT IN MY HOUSE??!! My poor friend has had to experience all my bug woes over the years but I think this time both R and I entertained her quite well.

I send the picture to my friend and call her. While we are on the phone R and I try to come up with a strategy on how to get it out of our home. My friend tells me that this is not a bug to fuck around with it, that we should just get rid of it. She goes on speakerphone while we gear up to battle the beast. We argue over who is going to nudge it and who will step on it. I could swear that for a good 10 minutes this was going on. And of course, the bug expert is on the line listening to us bicker at each other.

“You know I can’t go near spiders.”
“What? Neither can I.”
“Yes you can, your just making that up.”
“I was the one who found it, you get to kill it.”
“That’s not fair.”
“Yes it is.”
“We should capture it and study it.”
“What the hell for? Its big and disgusting and it has to die.”

So the husband holds the tree trimmer firmly and I am trying to hold the flashlight steady because you know by now the damn thing moved into the dark folds. I try to back away as far as I could in the room and R just kept pushing me forward because it was my job to step, capture or keep an eye on it. Whichever was needed. So as R is poking and prodding the hairy monster, it moves. It keeps moving even after we were able to get parts of it off. R started to beat the blanket and it finally stopped moving. It was in a whole bunch of pieces, on the blanket that was now on the floor. All while R was doing his thing with the tree shears I am squealing and freaking out and I actually believe R was too. You would have to ask my friend that was still on the speakerphone listening to our episode of “how not to kill a spider”.

After the massacre we carefully looked at all the pieces of that nasty monster on my beautiful blue snuggle blanket. R asked me what we are going to do with it and I immediately say,

“We are going to throw it out.”
“How are you going to get it off that blanket?”
“Are you kidding me, I’m not going to touch that thing again.”
“You mean your gonna throw the whole blanket away?”
“You bet your ass I’m throwing it away. Unless you want to sleep with it again?”
“Ill go get you a bag.”

It took a lot of maneuvering and a bit of bravery to get the bag over the blanket without touching anything. I did get that whole blanket in there and its ready for the garbage men to take the spider to its final resting place.

R and I went back to our computers. There is nothing like some couple bonding.