I want it to be said that when reciting the litany of things-that-I-will-and-will-not-do that every misguided new mother maintains, I never once said that I would not resort to cheap bribery to gain compliance.

I may have been overly optimistic, but I was not deluded, even in the clutches of brain-clouding mommy-hormones.

I also stated very early in the game that there were some problems in this world that really can be solved by throwing money at them and baby poop tops that list.

I am proud to say that I have stuck to my principles.

My son is potty training. He started this in earnest when we went to California on vacation and left him with my more experienced, competent and doting mother-in-law. I think if we could have stayed another week, we would have come back to a son that was not only in big-boy pants, but was cleaning the toilet after each flush. If only we had more vacation time.

Without trying to be delicate with my euphemism, my son would not poop in the potty. No amount of begging or cajoling seemed to make a dent in his resolve to use his pullup as a repository for all solid waste. Liquid, no problem – he is very quick to tell us when he has to use the potty to pee, if for no other reason than the novelty of playing the “aim game”. Apparently pooping doesn’t have the same cachet.

It was time to up the ante.

“Harry, do you need to poopy this morning?”

“Nope.”

(I know this is false. My son is like clockwork in that department – 30 minutes to the second after he wakes, he has his morning constitutional. It’s as steady as the rising sun.)

“You know, if you poop in the potty, I will give you some chocolate.”

“I think I want to peepee in the potty.”

“Sorry, kid. That’s not going to hack it. It’s poop only. This is a limited offer.”

I turned to finish picking out his school clothes, and Harry disappeared. Two minutes later, I went into the bathroom to find him on his little potty, sitting with a look of utter concentration on his face.

“Harry, did you go peepee?”

“No, Mommy. I am pooping for chocolate.”

Ah, cheap bribery. It works.

My aspiring folk singer:

[kml_flashembed movie="http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docid=8674670723756691492" width="400" height="326" wmode="transparent" /]

It isn’t his greatest rendition, but what can you expect of a command performance before breakfast when you have a tank engine up your shirt?

I suspect he was humoring me.

I am NOT a graceful person. My accident prone nature is almost legendary amongst my friends, and a source of endless amusement to my husband. I strongly suspect this is why he married me. I am cheap entertainment of the slapstick variety. I am constantly sporting a bruise, cut or burn from some sort of household mishap.

Even knowing this, I choose to tempt fate.

I haven’t been blogging recently because I have been nursing an injured hand. When I am warm, it is moderately functional, but when I get cold, it is pure torture to type. My office turned on their air conditioning a week ago, and I am convinced it was a well-calculated attempt to punish me for some managerial infringement.

But the injury was my fault. I got it doing this:

[kml_flashembed movie="http://lads.myspace.com/videos/vplayer.swf" width="430" height="346" fvars="m=30722865;type=video" wmode="transparent" /]

That is me, but that’s not the skirmish I actually got the injury in – this one’s a few months earlier – but reviewing the video of that particular fight is still a bit painful at present.

So, for all you folks who have this picture of me as a gushing middle aged mommy-blogger:

Think again.

My friends, Charlotte and Ray and their two very well behaved girls were visiting us for a “project weekend” this past weekend. There was a TON of sewing done, and some Guitar Hero (you can guess respectively which halves of the couple were responsible for what).

At one point there was the inevitable supply run. No weekend of company is complete without at least one, and usually two, visits to the local Walmart. As we were walking to the checkout, Ray was giving me a certain amount of grief over my handful of purchases.

Three crochet hooks, a pair of knitting needles and reading glasses.

If that isn’t a shopping list for retirement, I don’t know what is.

Now, I learned how to crochet at the age of seven, so I will take no grief over that, however, I am unabashedly entering the bifocal years, where my arm seem to get shorter and shorter every time I have to read the fine print on a medication bottle, or thread a needle. I caved into reading glasses about two years ago out of expediency when I spent over five minutes trying to thread a needle, and cutting my son’s tiny toes became too hazardous.

But the knitting is new.

I tried to teach myself to knit with very limited success several times in the past. My ex-mother-in-law was a knitting machine – and I was the lucky beneficiary of her productive largess. I had some of the most beautiful handknit sweaters and shrugs – all lost in Katrina. They were prisoners of my hope chest when it took on three days of briny water and didn’t drain. The amount of hot water washing that would be necessary to remove the stench and mold would have rendered them too small to be worth salvaging.

Gulf Coast Louisiana isn’t exactly sweater country, and all my beautiful sweaters didn’t see much use. I find myself back in a part of the country where sweaters are actually useful, but my sweater supply line was cut as an unfortunate by product of my divorce. Without another prolifically retired knitting relative to take up the slack, I have decided to struggle through the unnatural-ness of learning two-needle yarncraft. I sat down one night last week, and managed to cast-on a scarf and knit six laborious rows before sleepiness hit me and I had to (literally) wrap it up for the night.  Even this small feat was only made possible by frequent consultation with the instructional book from the teach-yourself-kit I bought at Barnes and Noble.

I came down from dressing the next morning, and found how utilitarian knitting needles really were. My son was pushing his Thomas the Tank engine between some very familiar-looking pink train tracks, and my neophyte scarf was laying in a jumbled pile of tangled wool on the floor beneath.

I expressed my displeasure with my son’s choice of construction materials a little, um, vociferously.

Maybe a little too vociferously.

Harry jumped and dropped his train and gave me a completely stunned look. I lowered my voice and explained to him for the five-hundredth time that everything in the house was not his to take, and that he had made me very sad by ruining my knitting. He said nothing, but he hung his head in silence all the way to the car. As I buckled him into his seat, I asked him if he wanted to say he was sorry.

“No.”

“Well, you don’t HAVE to say you are sorry. That’s up to you. I am sorry I yelled at you, but I spent a long time making that knitting and it made me very sad and very angry that you took my needles and pulled it all apart.”

I got into the front seat and started toward work.

About a quarter mile from the house, Harry finally spoke again.

“Mommy?”

“Yes, Harry?”

“I want to say I am sorry.”

“Thank you, Harry. That makes me feel much happier. Now let’s have a nice morning.”

I hope and pray that the lesson my son learned is not to say that he is sorry. I hope he learned to FEEL sorry when he hurts someone. Even when he didn’t mean it. Even when it was an honest mistake.

If he does, he is miles away from a lot of adults I know.

I just got home last night from a business trip. The trip out was uneventful, and everything at the site went smoothly, leaving me with a few hours to kill before my flight home. The earlier flights were all booked up, so I settled in with the Nintendo to while away the time, trying not to think of the fact that I could be home, tickling my son and cooking him dinner.

The first leg of the flight home went smoothly. One of those weird side-effects of our airline-hub methods of flight routing means that sometimes I have to fly through Dallas to go from Knoxville to Little Rock.  Look at a map to fully appreciate how counter-intuitive this is. I can practically look down and wave at my house while I go by, and I am less than halfway home by airline standards.

Then, in Dallas, my routine luck (or lack thereof) with air travel started to kick in.

First, the flight was delayed. This, I should be used to. This is something that I should learn to pretty much build into my travel plans. On-time flights are not the norm of my flight experience. They fall somewhere behind “Delayed” and above “Canceled” on the travel continuum. On the last leg of a flight, it’s not really much more than an annoyance – it lacks the urgency of a delayed first leg, where there are connections to be missed, and forced overnight stays in bland airport hotels.  Nevertheless, it all keeps me away from my kid, it’s only a matter of degree.

And that, is the crux of it. Delays. Keep. Me. From. Home.

I don’t mind travel. I am a good traveler.  I am reserved and polite to service personnel. I am flexible and (mostly) reasonable and patient. I like solitude, and I amuse myself easily. I pack sparingly and prepare for contingency.

But, at heart, I like to be at home.

In my own space.

With my loved ones.

My son is growing up so quickly, and the great downside of my job is the separation from him that makes me miss some of the funny little moments that make up his days. I genuinely LIKE my child. I enjoy his company, this little man that is so very like and yet unlike me. He is sweet and sharing and funny and inquisitive, and I like being around him.

While I intuitively know that I would rather arrive home alive and intact and late than not arrive at all, even the most necessary of delays makes me impatient and grumpy.

I want to go home.

The equipment (that cute euphemism for PLANE) was delayed in arriving in Dallas for my flight home, which forced a half-hour delay in boarding.  And then the weather required air traffic control to reroute our flight plan to Dallas, which resulted in another 45 minute delay while we sat on the tarmac, like a toy plane in a rubber band gun, waiting for a “GO!”

For those of you who do not fly, you have to realize that planes, when NOT flying, aren’t really temperature controlled to any great extent.  When you cram that much humanity, arm-to-arm and leg-to-leg,  in a metal tube with scant ventilation, it gets a bit warm.  Warm and fragrant.

So now I am late.  AND hot.  AND stinky.

We finally did take off, and within minutes I realized that air traffic control must have been faced with a choice of greater and lesser evils when planning our route, because that weather I mentioned?  We didn’t really AVOID it.  We just avoided MOST of it.  The part we didn’t avoid threw us around the sky like dandelion fluff.  I would have hated to fly through the most of it we did miss.

So now, I am late, hot, stinky AND queasy.

As we were circling our approach into Little Rock,  the lady in the seat next to me woke up (from, as it turned out, her Dramamine induced stupor), and she chatted amicably with me as we coasted down for a landing.  Normally I avoid this kind of pleasantry, but I had finished my book, and was too motion-sick to want to start another, and her accent was very distinctive.  It turned out that she was a really delightful lady, on her way from Auckland, New Zealand to see her daughter graduate Summa Cum Laude from an American university.  In fact from my alma mater.

She had been on planes for 40 hours and hadn’t seen her daughter for six months.

I bow to her.

She wins.

I loved it when my son started to talk.  He is not normally a whiny “Mommy, Mommy, Mommy” kind of kid, so talking meant that I got to hear what was going on in his little head (endlessly fascinating), and figure out the causes of the few attacks of frustration that he does have (most helpful).  Walking is pretty overrated.  Climbing is DEFINITELY overrated, but, as milestones go, talking didn’t really have a downside.

Well, except for the fact that the talking and social filters don’t really develop at the same time.

I started out yesterday morning with a catastrophic clothing failure.  And by now the entire world knows.

My son is a very safety-minded little boy.  He will NOT allow the car to move unless he is properly strapped in his carseat.  And he will let you know this.

Apparently, in my haste to get him and all my lunch/briefcase/purse stuff into the car, I looped the straps over his shoulders, but forgot to properly snap and buckle them.  We made it to the end of the street before his rapidly escalating alarm got my attention.

“Mommy, stop…”

“MOMMY stop…”

“MOMMY STOP THE CAR.  I NEED TO BE STRAPPED IN.   AAAAAAAHHHHH!”

I pulled over and jumped out and fixed his distress and told him what a good boy he was to be sure he was being safe.

As I jumped back into the car, a loud tearing sound and a suddenly drafty and loose feeling in the vicinity of my right thigh alerted me that I had experienced a clothing failure of a monumental nature.

Now.  Let me pause here to emphasize something.

I do NOT.  DO NOT.  Wear. Tight. Jeans.

I positively despise anything constricting on my body.

I want that point to be very, very clear to you when I describe the fact that my brand new, worn-only-twice, pair of dove gray Old Navy jeans had split from mid-thigh all the way to the bottom of the front zipper.  It wasn’t something that could be easily hidden just by staying behind a desk all day.  One trip to the restroom and my entire office would know the color and nature of my lingerie.  (And to those living life vicariously – NO I will not tell you what that was.)

So I got back in the car and pointed it back to the driveway.

“Mommy, are we going home?”

“Yes honey, Mommy needs to get a new pair of pants.  These ones are torn.”

“Mommy, did you split your pants?”

“Yes, baby.  I am going to put new ones on.”

“Mommy, did you split your pants WIDE OPEN?”

“Yes, baby.”

When we returned to the car, and were properly buckeled and on our way again, the morning conversation pretty much picked up where it had left off.

“Mommy, do you have on NEW pants?”

“Yes, baby.”

“Because you split your old ones WIDE OPEN?”

Sigh.

I am sure that by now, Harry’s entire preschool knows about the fate of my pants.

I just hope they don’t know the color of my underwear.

Hard to tell which is sweeter – the girl or the flowers.

The beautiful girl is Harry’s cousin – my sister Jennifer’s daughter – amongst the lilacs at the Highland Park Lilac Festival in my hometown; over 500 varieties of fragrant spring goodness.

The smell of lilacs always makes me a tiny bit homesick for New York in the spring.

As an adult, this is horribly embarrassing, but I am almost beside myself with impatience. I am taking a little weekend trip in September, and I can’t wait.

I bought my son tickets for a ride on Thomas the Tank Engine.

Nashville is the closest place that he will be coming, so September 6 was the earliest Saturday I could get tickets. Nashville also has the side benefit of letting us visit with our friends Steph and Carson, whom we don’t see nearly as often as we used to.

I bought the tickets before I read Amalah or Jodi’s experiences with A Day Out with Thomas.

And now, well…

…I am STILL excited.

I don’t precisely know why, but despite my adult tendencies toward entertainment of the classical music/winetasting/museum variety, I cannot escape the fact that I grew up staunchly lower-middle-working-class. I never attended a single event requiring tickets that was not a Disney movie. I don’t know if it is my desire to willfully recapture a shortened childhood that makes me an easy person to amuse, but ask anyone who knows me best and they will tell you that I get ridiculously excited about the smallest of things.

This also makes me a HORRIBLY easy mark when it comes to my kid. I don’t know what flavor of overcompensation it is – only child/older mother, deprived childhood history, you take your pick – but the net result is that I get stupidly disproportionate joy from indulging my son. In my favor – I am pretty firm in other areas, like courtesy and personal hygiene. I am not so good at teaching that deprivation and disappointment are pretty much facts of life.

Those lessons he can learn somewhere else.

We’re going to ride with Thomas.

One thing I am proud of, in one of those stupid “look at what a good mommy I am” ways, is that I do make a concerted effort to expose Harry to a bit of culture at a level somewhere above Thomas the Tank Engine videos on the tube. Okay, so I will admit that this is unfortunately balanced out by my unabashed use of said videos to garner myself 30 minutes of peace to do little things, like, um, make dinner. Or tend to personal hygiene. You know, luxuries like that.

In my son’s short life, he has been to an assortment of cultural enrichment expeditions ranging from the Eastman Museum of Photography to a performance of Handel’s Messiah, to an Anuna concert in a gothic revival church. This weekend my son attended his first opera. Okay, technically he attended his first operetta, since it was a performance of Strauss’s “Die Fledermaus”, but it’s close enough to the real deal for an almost-three-year-old. It has the advantages of being light and fluffy, with lots of color and movement. It’s kind of a nice, kid-friendly prelude to the heavier fare. I think Wagner is a little intense for anyone under, say, forty.

It was just short of a disaster.

It started out well enough. We arrived early and Harry and I sat in the lobby of the Rep, sipping soda and eating peanuts. The pre-opera refreshments consumed, and with curtain call imminent, we found our seats which were on the first row of the Mezzanine with a beautiful unimpeded view of the stage.

We were not on the aisle. We were on the interior wall of the box. Just a tip for any of you who are contemplating the inculturation of your toddlers – pick an aisle seat. It becomes very important later.

Another tip for your piece of mind – if you are on the front row of the Mezzanine with your toddler, confiscate all small toys that may become projectiles at one point during the performance. While this is not as important later, it will result in a significant reduction in the stress from the constant vigilance that arises when you imagine some poor old gentlemen suffering the surgical removal of a Thomas the Tank Engine from his bald skull.

The first act went remarkably well. Harry was mesmerized. He stood with his nose pressed up against the guard rail of the opera box. His running commentary on the stage action was even quiet and polite; “Mommy, why is that lady crying? Mommy, why is that man hiding? Who is that man with the white hair?”

The first intermission came and went, filled with trips to the potty, more soda and peanuts, and the confiscation of the earlier mentioned Thomas. We settled into our seats for the second act.

And this, lovely guests, is the point in which I remembered, rather belatedly, that the line between fantasy and reality in a toddler’s world is blurred to the point of near non-existence. Which is not normally a problem. Except when their father is actually IN the opera.

Kris had a minor role in the opera as Ivan the Major-Domo. He didn’t have many lines, but he was a major sight-gag throughout the second act and was only person on stage at the beginning of the act – a fact which did not escape the audience present because it was announced VERY LOUDLY during the VERY QUIET beginning of the act.

“THERE’S MY DADDY!”

“Shhh, baby, that is Daddy. Let’s be quiet and watch.”

“WHAT IS DADDY DOING WITH THOSE GLASSES?”

“Shhh, baby, he is giving champagne to the people at the party.”

“DADDY IS AT THE PARTY? I WANT TO GO TO THE PARTY!”

“Yes baby, but it’s a pretend party, we will meet Daddy after the party.”

“NO. DADDY IS DONE NOW! I WANT DADDY TO GET OUR STUFF!”

At this point, my son commenced a display of his very Irish temper and proceeded to scream with rage – a scream cut short by my hand clamped over his mouth. When it became obvious that this was no mistake on his part, and any further cultural exposure would have to be made by forcibly gagging and binding him to keep him from leaping over the Mezzanine to the stage below, I decided that he had his dose of opera for the day, and it was probably best to beat a retreat.

Remember. Always pick an aisle seat.

Because if you have to haul a 30-lb. three year old through a dark theater, with your hand over his mouth and his feet dangling, tripping over the overstuffed purses of a row of blue haired old ladies, and guaranteeing that you will land in their laps, you WILL NOT be popular.

Sometimes it’s best just to leave the theater so they don’t recognize your face later when law enforcement is accessible.

I consoled myself with the Container Store and Starbucks for the rest of the afternoon until the opera has safely ended and we could slink back into the empty theater to pick up Kris. Of course, Harry was delighted to find that they had not cleaned up the released balloons from the end of the ill-fated party scene, and managed to steal off a car full before they swept them off for disposal.

Nevertheless, it made an impression.

As Kris buckeled him into his carseat and sat down behind the wheel to drive home. Harry called up:

“Daddy! Daddy, we had FUN at the OPERA!”

But for me, I think I will take my culture a little more on the side from now on.

Yesterday my son discovered the sweetener packets on the restaurant table in IHOP.

“I want a blue one!”

“No, honey, the blue one is not good for little boys.  You can have a white one.”

Three minutes, two white packets, and one sticky, sparkly, granulated toddler finger later…

“Mommy, these, THESE ARE GOOD for little boys.”