No Girls Allowed

Following one great Easter weekend birthday with our little family, Porter finally got the birthday party he has been talking about ever since he went to his friend Jonathan's Toy Story party the first weekend in February. The almost three-month party planning started with one almost-five-year-old edict: no girls.

From there, we went back and forth between themes based on whatever Porter had most recently played with his friends at preschool. We went from superheroes to Transformers to race cars, back to superheroes, then to dinosaurs, and finally back to race cars. Considering this one eats, sleeps and breathes Matchbox cars, Lightning McQueen and Mighty Machines, the birthday boy's final selection was not at all surprising.

So we played Red Light, Green Light.

Had a stoplight tire toss.

And the big event: the Piston Cup, complete with pit stops to change tires from one crew member to the next.

Opened presents.

And if you've never watched a group of little boys clamor for the best spot in gifting, you should. So much fun to hear the sudden "Awesome!" and "Open mine next!" and "Oh yeah! I always wanted this!" pop out of the impenetrable mass of t-shirts, spikes and curls.

As expected, this fiery gal held her own just fine amidst the big boys.

And finished off with cake.

Note to self: next year, give yourself that extra half hour before start time.

That's right, we were 15 minutes late to our own party because, not at all surprisingly, somebody did not think it would take "that long" to finish up her two-day baking project.

It was a lot of work, but most definitely worth it to see this rapidly growing up little guy running and playing and laughing with his pals at his side. So much fun.

A Promise Kept

With parenthood, comes planning. Lots and lots of planning. Lists and lists full of stuff you have to do, stuff you'd like to do, and stuff you dream about but suspect will never materialize.

In the Burt home, a majority of Andy's planning falls into the middle category, while my own purview lies among the extremes. This means I am great at making -- and keeping -- doctor's appointments and dreaming up giant summer vacations, but that at any given moment, fifty-plus percent of my efforts are in vain, thanks to nap times and budgets and scheduling conflicts and temperaments and, and, and.

This also means that my oldest has, sadly, grown accustomed to big promises with a much smaller payoff. Like when, just this Monday, I loaded the kids, our 64-pack of crayons and a pad of art paper into the car to drive to the campus art museum (which is featuring artwork from thousands of local school kids), where I had planned for the kids to wander through the walls of kiddie-sized art and then head outside to make their own mini masterpieces. Turns out the museum is closed on Mondays, so we rolled down the a big grassy hill just outside the museum and hunted for pine cones instead.

But I digress...our five-year-old (still so crazy that he is so old!) has had his share of disappointment, thanks to a mom with very poor timing. I feel bad about this all the time. In fact, I often catch myself throwing ideas out into the air without any consideration of reality, only to find out that the ever-attentive Porter has carefully memorized every detail of said dream and will later hold me accountable for the fact that we never snuck those snow cones into the movie that had already been bumped out of rotation in our two-theater town.

All of this is my very wordy way of saying, simply, I want to give my kids the world but more often than not come up short.

But I refuse to stop scheming. Because sometimes it really is everything we imagined. And I am oh so grateful that on my oldest's actual birth day (and just two days after I had to tell him we'd postponed his birthday party because none of his friends would be in town over Easter weekend), we lucked our way into perfect.

The rain was even kind enough to hold off until after we'd left for the day.

What started as a low-key but happy morning of new toys and Porter's favorite cereal,

Turned into a dream birthday when a quick trip to pick up our bake-at-home pizza and ice cream pizza cake revealed a traveling carnival on the other side of town.

So I hightailed it back to the house and asked Porter if he wanted to go on a birthday adventure. Dubious, as he rightly should have been given my track record, he wasn't sure if he wanted to leave the new cargo plane and Matchbox cars. But enthusiasm rules when it comes to kids, and I was most certainly enthused. In one fell swoop, all the rescheduled promises were forgotten with his first glimpse of the Fanny Flyer (in truth, he was fine with the rescheduled party, but I felt bad because the last minuteness of it -- as RSVPs came in -- meant I had not planned any other birthday hoopla).

 

And, as all good perfect days go, the rest does not require much explanation.

He loved being in charge of the tickets and counting out just enough for each ride.

He got mad every time I tried to take the wheel on the bumper cars (just a few inches too short to go it alone).

Could have watched the brave souls on the Kamikaze for hours (though he made it very clear that he would NEVER want to go on it -- "not even when I'm old like you."

And made my heart stop every time he shifted or took a deep breath at the top of the ferris wheel (I didn't remember that they didn't have seatbelts -- the things I never noticed before I had kids).


Luckily, Look Mommy, no hands! was quickly followed by a slight wind gust that brought him back to his normally cautious demeanor.

We left in the very best of birthday moods and with dirty feet for me (what was I thinking wearing flip flops?) and big smears of dirt all over Porter's face that are most certainly indicative of a great day for a five-year-old boy.

A nice reminder that the tallied mommy guilt of unfulfilled ice cream bribes and trips to the park at dinnertime should be taken in stride.

Because it would not be nearly as magic if every day felt like a fifth birthday.

Could you...

Aside from the normal kids-say-the-darndest-things, I have really been loving how they articulate just about everything -- a random mixture of befuddled grammar and not-quite-accurate descriptions that come together in one conversation after another that you wish you could remember forever.

And even in the wee hours of the morning, when the house is cold and I am a tad under-dressed for anything that does not involve my down comforter, these little linguistic anomalies stop time for this word-nerd mom who relishes the sweetness of little people learning to speak their minds more than anything else that comes with this parenting gig.

It would seem, at 3:15 in the morning, after not going to bed until 11:45 and when I have to wake up in two-and-a-half hours to start the day, little people talk is, apparently, my Kryptonite.


And so begins the story of How in the world was I bested by a two-year old?

This little gal woke me with a start from a dream that I can't quite remember with a whimper-screech followed by coughing and sniffles. And considering I am a heavy sleeper and because my kids very, very rarely wake in the middle of the night, I jumped out of bed before realizing what I was doing. And before I knew it, I -- cry-it-out champion -- had broken my own rule and was face to face with a not so sleepy girlie who actually giggled as I rushed into her room to find out what was wrong.

Turns out nothing was wrong. Of course. And though I prompted about sore throats and cold toes, little miss Nora simply looked up at me with mischievous eyes and said, "Pwease could you want to wok-a-bye me, mommy?"


And I crumbled with that one could-you-want-to and, to my own surprise, I wok-a-bied.

The rest of the story is pretty predictable. My heart was warm, my toes were freezing and, eventually, I realized that I was whisper talking to a very wily two-year-old about her daddy's snoring and her sleepy stuffed animals who were waiting for her to come back to bed. I then came to my senses and was just about to close her bedroom door when I heard, "Mommy?...Could you...(this was a long pause -- she clearly had no idea what she would use next to keep the two of us awake)...could you...could you...just stay in here?

But I walked over, rubber her back and told her to go to sleep. And just as I was settling back into my own bed, she started wailing, "I want my mommy -- I am not so sleepy anymow!" over and over and over again for what felt like hours. And when that didn't work, she threw in "I want my daddy!" just for good measure. At which point, Andy stopped pretending to be asleep, and we actually considered -- in whisper discussion -- "just" letting her sleep with us.

Now, anyone who knows me knows I am a stickler for routine and schedules and consistency when it comes to kids and sleep. And while I do think the idea of co-sleeping sounds a bit dreamy in a my-kids-are-so-angelic-and cuddly-when-they-sleep kind of way, for me, no kid is cute and cuddly enough to justify half-sleeping on the very edge of your own bed. Saturday morning storytime in bed? Bring it on. But Mommy's bed is off limits from sundown to sunup. In fact, unless it's an emergency, Mommy is off limits from sundown to sunup.

Now that you know where I stand, you can imagine just how out-of-my-mind tired I must have been when I responded, "No. I'll just go sleep in there until she falls back to sleep." Equally. Bad. Idea.

Thus, I found myself cold, crick-necked and very suddenly awake on Nora's bedroom floor one hour later when I heard a "Moooommy...awre you awake? Be awake with me still, ok? We can play pwincesses, ok?"

And maybe it was because I had to get up in an hour anyway; or maybe it was because a surge of love jolted me with a this-could-be-our-first-slumber-party reverie; or maybe it was just that, even at 5 o'clock in the morning, I can't help but smile when she says pwincess instead of princess, but I actually considered it before collecting my pillow and giving her a much more definite no.

The kicker to this rambling tale of sleep deprivation and little kid trickery?

I shut the door, laid down in my bed, and no more than two minutes later, the "not so tired anymow" two-year-old stopped screaming and was fast asleep. I had been duped.