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By rebecca, January 25, 2012 1:59 pm

Confession: I can’t get my kids to pick up after themselves.

It’s worse than that, in fact. They like to take entire toy bins and games with a zillion pieces and just dump them out all over the floor. Leave them alone for a few minutes and you will return to find a room that looks less like some children have been playing and more like a madman has been rifling through all the drawers and shelves, throwing and breaking things willy nilly.

We had taken all of the board games they’ve been given as gifts and put them away in a cabinet in the office. They’re really too young for board games, anyway, without full adult participation. During a visit with Ed’s parents last night, however, Colum followed me down to help choose a board game for him to play with his grandparents. He claimed to already know where the games were kept and I reminded him that he wasn’t to get them out on his own. They played Sorry and Guess Who, said goodnight to grandma and grandpa and went to bed.

End scene.

I’m upstairs nursing Mary, getting her changed and dressed, getting dressed myself and am engrossed in assorted other morning business. The kids are downstairs playing or watching TV, I assume. I come down to find ALL OF THE BOARD GAMES including two versions of Monopoly opened and their contents strewn across the living room. I dare anybody to go from zero to utter destruction faster than my two oldest kids. The only game they’d left downstairs was 90′s Trival Pursuit, of course.  I don’t think there’s a single soul under the age of 30 who is even tempted by that one. (But if you are over 30 …  Dudes, 90′s Trivial Pursuit! My place! After bedtime!)

The upshot is that I spent all morning cleaning and organizing various game pieces and play monies. I tried to yell at them to clean everything up, but it was clear they were in WAY over their heads. If I wanted actual games that could ever be played with again (and, believe me, I totally considered the big garbage bag instead), then I’d have to do this myself. The Monopoly with which Colum is utterly fascinated, but is way too old for him, is put away where nobody but me will ever find it, the linen closet. The rest of the games are put back into the office cabinet and will be taken away for a LONG time should they be pulled out without permission again.

Still, though. My kids don’t pick up after themselves even aside from X-TREME BOARD GAME DISASTERS ™. I’ve tried everything. And, by everything, I mean that I’ve tried using every kind of empty threat that I can think of. I know there are other (better!) ways of getting your kids to tidy up on a regular basis, but they all seem to involve copious amounts of time and energy, of which I am in short supply.

So, dear readers, what is the exact, magic empty threat that will finally work? Okay, fine, I’ll even consider more arduous approaches that involve actual parenting and discipline and all that jazz. I’m getting desperate.

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By rebecca, January 16, 2012 5:00 am

Pre-pregnancy jeans, take 3:

Image courtesy flickr.com/photos/23126594@N00/135026216/

Image courtesty flickr.com/photos/veganfeast/3925029206/

Success!

Well, my mid-section is still a little more muffiny than, say, a baguette with, er, hips and leaky breasts. (How do those French women stay so slim?) But this time — THIS TIME — I have been able to wear them for several hours and they don’t even hurt.

So either my sweet-free New Year’s resolution is yielding results or my jeans finally caved. “Hot damn, woman, you’re not trying to fit that ass in here again, are you?! Okay, stitching, we’re going to have to give a little this time.”

Either way, I seem to have developed a disturbing affinity for pastry-themed analogies.

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By rebecca, January 10, 2012 11:45 pm

Okay, it’s time to talk about diapering. I can hear the cheering already.

I used a diaper service (paid for by my mom) for the first few months with Colum and then switched to disposables full-time when my service ran out. (Until we were toilet training, that is. I swear by cloth trainers if you’re not too poo adverse.) With Irene I requested that my mom just buy me some diapers instead, but she really wanted me to have the service for the first couple months. So we picked out a couple dozen larger-sized prefolds at a local store. The problem was that they were too big when the service ended and then I lost all my cloth diapering mojo by the time they did fit. I think I used about half a dozen, one time. Oh god, the guilt still burns.

Pregnant the third time around, I figured there was no point even trying to kid myself. Three kids. There was no way I would be organized enough to pull off cloth this time. I was reading Amalah all summer, of course, since she just had her third kid and I needed to remember how to find the humour in sleep deprivation and spit up-drenched sheets. So, yes, I read her epic posts about cloth diapering with three kids and what works and what doesn’t and saw how cute the bums are with the diapers and the covers and everything. But nah, I wasn’t swayed. My pregnant cohort Emma Willer went out and got some cloth diapers for her third baby and I think I laughed. These women were simply better people than me and I didn’t mind saying so. I was keeping my expectations low this time and I didn’t care how many baby seals they had to club for me to do so. (What’s that? Disposables don’t come from baby seals? Oh, that’s much better.)

Fast forward three months and I’m pretty sure I lost an entire week of my life reading an internet’s worth of wisdom about cloth diapers (and don’t even ask about the Youtube videos). Before I knew it there were diapers arriving in the mail, the word “Snappi” became a regular part of my vernacular and I started cornering defenseless (and often childless) people and forcing folding demonstrations on them. And my poor brother-in-law, Sean, knows more than he ever wanted to about the antibacterial properties of properly lanolized wool. I may need a twelve step program, but at least I haven’t purchased a pack of diapers in a couple months!

I’m not sure exactly how I got from there to here, but I know it has something to do with unearthing a dozen unopened prefolds from the Irene days. I thought maybe I’d sell them or give them away, but the guilt! It burns! Money was pretty tight leading up to Christmas, too, so the idea of washing my own diapers started to shift columns from “time-consuming idealism” to “worth it to save a buck”. And of course all those cloth diaper posts I’d read were rattling around in my subconscious, quietly chipping away at my determination to do everything the easiest way possible. The final straw, however, was when I had to change Mary’s entire outfit — undershirt and all — THREE TIMES in one afternoon because of poo squishing up her back. This does not happen with cloth diapers; it just doesn’t. The poo might ooze a bit around the legs and they clearly can’t compete with disposables in terms of pure volume of pee containment, but you won’t have to deal with poo exploding up the your infants back over and over again. Screw this noise, I thought, and stuffed a giant prefold into small-sized Bummi wrap and called it a day.

Right then. Since this prelude to a small post about cloth diapering has become a long post unto itself, I’m going to have to hit you with a cliff hanger here. More details about what, how and why I cloth diaper will follow later this week. Can you even wait?!

Oh god, at this rate I won’t have any readers left by the end of the month.