Nothing a few M&Ms can't fix

Every year around Mother's Day, Salary.com has been releasing a study of how much stay-at-home-moms should be paid based on the various jobs they perform. Among the duties listed in our job description are cook, nurse, daycare provider, janitor, teacher, etc. The one job missing from the list is hazardous materials specialist.

It has been another poopy week for us. It all started about 2 weeks ago when, to my best guess, Bear was a wee bit constipated, had a painful poop, and decided he was not going to be doing that again. Thus began the proclamations of "My tummy hurts, I have to poop - NO, I don't have to poop!" Despite our best efforts, we just could not coax him into pooping and after a couple of days he would not even consider sitting on the potty. 5 poopless days later we went to the doctor, who assured us that this is normal behavior for this age and sent us on our way with a suggestion of adding Miralax to his juice until the situation resolved itself. Lo and behold, an hour after finishing his laxative-laced apple juice, Bear did indeed sit down on the potty and produce approximately 5 days worth of poop. Problem solved. Or not. Bear, who has been writing new scripts for himself like crazy, had already decided that the potty is really optional. It was another 2 days before we saw any more movement, and then nothing again for nearly a week.

Funny thing about poop, you can only hold it for so long before it starts coming out on its own. At first we started to see evidence of an impending poop in his underwear, then little bits in the bathtub. Then the floodgates really opened. Skid marks turned into mudslides at a rate of 2 or 3 a day, each accident taking a half hour of clean up time and requiring a full wardrobe change. At one point Bear said "I don't feel good. There is something in my bottom." "That's poop" said I "and it needs to come out. Poop goes in the potty. If you don't sit on the potty, it will come out in your pants." "Then it's going to come out in my pants." said he. And sure enough, out it came at school an hour later. He came home with 2 plastic bags - one full of clothes, one full of poopy underwear - and a report from his teacher that she found him hiding under a pile of pillows. Bear may not care about the uncomfortable load in his underwear or smelling like skid row, but at least he has the good since to not want other people to know about it.

The fix was so simple I am ashamed that I didn't think of it earlier. M&Ms. The same bribe we used to potty train him in the first place. All it took was 2 M&Ms to get him back on track and then he seemed to get right back into the swing of things. Of course I have thought that before.

How Did I Get Here?

The boys and I are on our own again this week. NSSD is in Nashville on business. Now, it is a well-documented fact that I am a big old neurotic scaredy-cat who should never be left home alone at night. Every night, no matter how exhausted I am and how much I swear to myself that tonight I will be going to bed early, it is practically unheard of for me to hit the hay before midnight when I am alone. Oh, I will start off to bed at 10, but somehow what with all of the checking and rechecking of doors and windows, even getting back out of bed once or twice to make sure I didn't leave my house keys hanging in the front door, pretty soon 10 turns into 12 and there I am still being creeped-out by the overzealous motion detector light on our back porch and repositioning the phone on my nightstand to be within an easy arms reach.

Just before he left, NSSD, in all earnestness, asked me if I ever wondered to myself how we ended up here. (What? You mean crammed into an 1100 sq. ft. house not far from one of the scariest neighborhoods in one of the most crime-infested cities, an hour and a half commute from your office? You mean that?) It is funny that he brought it up as if he had just thought of it, when it is in fact a dialogue we have probably had 50 times in the past year. I know how we got here, and it actually made sense at the time. What I don't know, and am wondering now, is what are we still doing here?

We have been incredibly fortunate this year to have happened to be where we are, just half a mile from what has turned out to be an excellent school for Bear. But know, as we are nearing his next IEP, which will decide his fate for next year, it is looking more and more like we are about to be stuck paying for a year of private preschool in order to avoid pushing him into kindergarten before he is ready - a preschool that is a half-hour away. So once again I am asking myself "what are we still doing here?" and I guess the answer is we just don't know what else to do.