Coffee table:1, Claudia: 0

Just in time for the holiday Claudia had an altercation with a coffee table at Grandma and Grandpa's house. It wasn't pretty. The table came out of nowhere and sucker punched her.

However, you think that bump on her forehead looks bad? You should see the table. Okay, not really, but as you can see she looks really broken up about the whole thing so I'm letting her think that she won.

In an unrelated story, our dog, Ben, had a run in with the vet (my sister-in-law, Lynn) who decided to remove a couple of old dog warts on his head and face. The years are not kind to dogs.

And what did you do over the holiday weekend?

I can name that diagnosis in three symptoms

I am now one of those mothers.

Emily will be four in three months, yes I said months, and already I have begun planning her first party with friends as though it were some high society wedding. In my defense, and yes I realize that people with no defense are the kind of people that say things like, “In my defense,” this is a homemade party with a theme based on a literary figure. While I certainly have my shortcomings, buying plates and balloons with television show characters on them is not one of them, although I’m sure that day will come soon.

Obsessed...
The theme is Eloise, based on the Kay Thompson books. Well, it is more like tea at the Plaza with Eloise. Okay, it is really just “How much pink crap and candy can Emily get me to buy as long as she says that she wants it because she likes to read?” party. She knows that the “love of reading” button in me is huge and will let her get away with a multitude of sins.

Delusional...
Be that as it may, I am obsessed with all things Eloise and Plaza Hotel and black and white and pink. Emily and I have a pile of things to be made and this weekend I actually found myself looking at silver catalogs from my in law’s jewelry store and thinking that it seemed almost reasonable to order a bunch of fancy silver things on which to serve a roomful of four through eight year-olds sandwiches cut into dainty triangles. Perhaps we could skip next months mortgage payment and instead by a three-tiered serving tray. Perhaps I need more sleep.

I thought that these were the kinds of things that first-time mothers of single children did. Wasn’t I supposed to be over all of this now that number two is here and number three is working his or her way into conversations and negotiations? Wasn’t this sort of over-the-top behavior supposed to be gone by now?

Manic...
This does not bode well for the future. Emily and Claudia’s birthdays are six months apart. That means once I build a giant sugar cube replica of the Plaza in our yard, hire a middle-aged British woman to play nanny, and buy a pug like Weenie for Emily’s party, I will have six months to start building giant topiary pandas, or whatever we happen to read about by then, for Claudia’s birthday.

God help us if she starts loving Clifford The Big Red Dog.

Does a tiara come with that title?

While I can’t say for sure that there was any kind of official voting or anything, I think that it is clear by this evening’s problems that I am, in fact, the World’s Worst Mother.

I have two children and tonight (it is 1:20 am now) neither of them has slept for more than about an hour at a stretch. And because they haven’t coordinated their wakings (or maybe they have and this is just part of the plan) it has been a seemingly endless up-and-down-every-twenty-minutes-or-so kind of night and I don’t have enough Paxil in my system to take anymore.

This is not to say that I haven’t tried to be a good mother, the kind that has children who do things like sleep at night. In fact, I have tried to walk a perfect line between the Dr. Sears school of non-stop comfort and support, and the Ferber camp’s goals of self-reliance and self-soothing. As it turns out, I have been an awful failure all the way around.

When Emily was born we co-slept partly for it’s ease with nursing and partly because at the time we were living in a tiny one bedroom apartment in the Twin Cities and there weren’t a lot of places to put her. Once we moved to the land of more than reasonable real estate prices she had her own room and crib and she took to them both with ease.

That is until the move to the “big girl bed” almost a year ago. The child we could put down awake, kiss goodnight, and shut in her own room has turned into the child that fears everything. Now our evenings consist of lying next to Emily for as long as it takes until she falls asleep. Some nights the routine is fifteen minutes, other nights there are hours of mind-numbing questions (generally a perfectly good, yet poorly timed question that is answered patiently and completely followed by “Huh?” or the exact same question that was just answered) and performances of the entire score of The Sound of Music done while lying on her back in the swirling acid trip colors of the Disney Princess nightlight.

Then once she is asleep and the sweet, sweet sounds of The Daily Show theme song begin to echo through the living room and replace the grating “So long, farewell…” in my head I hear it: the amplified cries of Claudia on the monitor.

Claudia. Poor child number two. Honestly she has gotten the short end of the stick since day one. While portraits were taken of Emily at birth, 3, 6, 9, 12 and 18 months, and two and three years, Claudia got them only a birth, 4 and 7 months. She is now 14 months old and if the other mother’s knew how poorly I have performed just the chronicling portion of my motherly duties they would be calling DHS right now.

Anyway, back to the sleeping, or lack thereof. Claudia has never even been introduced to a crib. She wouldn’t have the first clue what such a thing might be used for. She is still nursed to sleep in our bed in basically the same manner as she was from day one, and by that I mean about fifteen times a night. What in god’s name have I been thinking this last year? Isn’t the idea to learn from your experiences? Not, apparently, in our household. We seem to live by the idea that if you narrowly avert an awful traffic accident through sheer dumb luck, the next time you head to the store you should just close your eyes, hit the gas and go. Why bother with things like decision-making and critical thinking?

So here we are with the girls: the one that has deviated from the track, and the one that has never even heard of the track. And the parents: the dad that wants to blow off steam with a little video game action, and the mom that just wants a little time without children on her to sit agape at the condition of the world as brought to her by Jon Stewart.

Is it too much to ask that children turn out despite the best efforts of their parents?

The ersatz sounds coming from the monitor say yes. Here we go again.

No one makes life difficult like a sister

Today Emily and Claudia spent their time torturing each other.

Emily carried Claudia all over Grandma and Grandpa's house, even though Claudia made it very clear that she disliked such transportation.

Then, once Emily had settled down to watch a little TV (because, yes, I am the worst mom in the whole world, I allow some TV) Claudia tortured Emily by turning off the TV 500 times in 10 minutes.

But, when all was said and done, and bath time imminent, Emily got out a pink, cotton candy- flavored Popsicle (yes, I allow those too) and shared it sweetly with Claudia.

Brushy Creek: Ft. Dodge's summer hotspot

Here are the girls enjoying the lovely beaches of Brushy Creek, just outside of Ft. Dodge. While you may mistake it for the Virgin Islands, it is really just a little pond in the middle of nowhere in Iowa.

Here is sweet Evelyn with the girls.

Claudia always looks so serious about everything in photos.

Even sand.

Who packs the winter coats for the beach?

This is the lovely Fillenwarth Beach Resort in Okoboji, IA, the place we are going today on our vacation. It is a lovely resort with swimming and sandy beaches just right to make sand castles on. Perfect for a relaxing week with the girls, except that it is 56 degrees outside!

Check back soon for vacation pictures of our blue-tinged girls, wrapped up in blankets on the beach, enjoying a midwest summer. Ahh, Iowa in June.

Our big weekend in pictures

Eric, the girls, and I went to Minneapolis last weekend for the Bar Mitzvah of Jacob Finn, one of the two boys I nannied for years. We were welcomed with open arms as if we were long-lost, beloved family members which was a wonderful feeling since this is a family that I love as if it were my own.

Jacob did an amazing job, both with his presence as a public speaker and also in his speech about what the day and his Torah passage meant to him. It was bittersweet to see him up there, a boy I once carried and comforted, much closer to manhood than childhood now.

There was a party Saturday evening and at it, a free photo booth. We had more fun than you would think a family of four could have in something as simple as a photo booth. Even I, who is never comfortable having my picture taken, had a blast. Notice that Claudia appears to be cut from some 1800's photo and just stuck in with us, so serious in every single frame.

The face that isn't a Simonson is sweet Janie Finn, who is a much more refined and together person than I am, but for some reason she loves me anyway. This is a trait that many of my friends share and I vacillate between worrying that they are moments from realizing their mistake and just being thankful that dumb luck has come down in my favor again.