Armpit Confessions-What Makes Me Sweat-Deep Thinking 5-year-olds

“Does God have shots in heaven?” This question comes after I mention to my son that he has to get a shot the next day. I know what your thinking, don’t tell him he’s going in for a shot, you’re just asking for trouble. But my son is on the ball when it comes to the doctor. He knows it’s the ‘shot’ place; he also knows it’s the really cool sticker place. He’s very conflicted about the doctor. And he seems to do much better when we talk about things first. He wants a heads up or he will make me pay.

But back to the God giving shots in heaven question. My answer took a few minutes to formulate, but I thought I had it covered.

“I don’t know if God has shots in heaven, I’ve never been there,” I say confidently.

“I bet he doesn’t,” he says and throws himself down on his bed. Yikes. Is my son going to go to sleep wishing he could go to heaven tonight so he doesn’t have to get a shot tomorrow? That’s enough to keep me from sleeping for a week, and enough to make me sweat a shower under my shirt.

“Kids need to get shots to protect them from getting sick,” I say, trying to switch the direction of the conversation.

“Does God have any kids?” He asks. Oops, that didn’t work.

“Well, some people believe that Jesus is God’s son.”

“Do we believe that?” What ever happened to discussions about what the cow says and who oinks?

“I believe that Jesus is the son of God,” I say.

“What do I believe?” Hmmm. Before I could come up with an answer he asks, “what does daddy believe?”

Oy. “Daddy doesn’t believe or dis-believe. He has a broader view of God and heaven and Jesus.”

“What?”

Okay, I am dripping wet with sweat. This is not the kind of question you want to hesitate to answer, but also the not the kind of question you want to get wrong. Even if there is not real wrong, there could be a wrong answer for you and your family. And I just gave an answer that confused even me.

“You, me and daddy believe in heaven. And remember what I told you the last time we talked about heaven?” (Yes, we’ve had a similar discussion before. You would think I would get it right the second time around.)

“No.”

“I told you that most people live to be almost 100 years old, then they go to heaven.”

“Forever?”

“Well, yes.”

“What do we do in heaven forever?” My son has a look of panic on his face.

“What do you want to do in heaven?”

“Will my toys will be in heaven?”

“Well.” Deep sigh. “I think that whatever and whoever you love will end up in heaven someday.”

He seems to be contemplating this and he also seems to be much more at ease for the moment. I, on the other hand, am a mess. I don’t want my son to be scared of the whole God and heaven and death thing, he’ll be touched by it many times in his life, in fact, he already has been. We’ve had to deal with the death of my sister and the death of a friend’s infant son. I don’t want my son feel like he’d like to go check out this heaven place, but I don’t want him to be scared to go to sleep because he thinks he might die either.

“I think God has kids,” my son says finally.

“Me too.”

“I’m taking my toys with me when I go to heaven.”

“Okay.”

“Not ‘til I’m a hundred though, right?”

“Right.” Whew. He wants to stick around, even if it means he has to get a shot.

“Do I still have to get a shot?”

“I promise to get my flu shot if you get your flu shot. How about that?”

“Deal.” He puts out his hand for me to shake.

“Deal.”

I need a drink, and not some wimpy drink that ends with the words ‘fizz’ or ‘sour’. I need a drink that ends with the phrase, ‘straight up with two olives please’. Bartender?

Armpit Confessions-What Makes Me Sweat-Poop

My son has a mild fever and a tummy ache.

"What does it feel like?" I ask.

"Yucky," is the answer.

Well that doesn’t narrow it down for me much. It could be he simply needs to poop, and the fever is leftover from his ear infection last week. Or, he’s got a piercing pain in his stomach and he has the H1N1 flu and he will be admitted to the hospital within hours with life threatening symptoms, and I'll hold a vigil at his bedside banging myself on the head with his food tray and weeping that I should have been a better mom. My mind goes wild with possibilities, real and imagined, crazy and insane, none of them substantiated with any facts. But who cares. I need my stress fix for the week, and I ‘m sweating bullets. Turns out he just needed to poop.

Last week it was my dog. Her poop was mush, not just loose, I’m talking mushy mush. It’s mush quite often. She eats everything. What else can I expect but mushy poop. Still, I needed my stress fix for the week, something to make me sweat. This one actually sent my spiraling for a few weeks because it is an ongoing problem. I wanted to get her spayed, but what if she has explosion of poop while she is at the vet and they take her away from me and hand her over to doggie protective services because I should have gotten treatment for her mushy poop, and then my son never forgives me for losing the dog. (Whew, see how my head works.)

Actually, I did try to get her treatment. I've spent about $800 dollars on her for numerous visits to the vet and tests and medicines to get to the bottom of, no pun intended, the poop problem. Multiple doses of diarrhea medicine later, she still eats rocks and still doesn’t know how to poop like a proper dog.

‘Does it really matter?’ You ask. Well, she wakes me up a few times a night to be let out of the house to poop her mushy poop all over the backyard. So yes, it does matter since I haven’t slept through the night in 3 months. Sound like a newborn? It is, in a way, although I can leave her in her crate and go to the grocery store, And yes, leaving my son in his crib while I went out was something I thought about but, of course, never actually did, when my son was an infant. The thing is, infants will poop and sit in it and play with it, they don’t care. Dogs care. My dog won’t poop in her crate.

Lately, my little boy gets in to the dog’s crate with her, and as most mother’s would probably contemplate, but might not admit, I think to myself, ‘can I lock the crate and go for a pedicure? I’ll be quick, I promise’.

Armpit Confessions-What Makes Me Sweat-Tree Mold

“Mommy, what’s that?”

“I don’t know.”

“How can you not know? You’re the mom.”

Uh oh. Now I’m sweating. Make something up. Make something up quickly, I think to myself. I’m not exactly fast on my feet under pressure, especially the pressure from a 5-year-old who thinks I know everything. And who am I to discourage that thinking? I need an answer, fast.

“It’s mold,” I say.

“On a tree?”

“Sure, why not.”

“No it’s not.”

“You said I know everything, and I say it’s mold.”

"Yeah, Right.” My son smirks and walks away to hang from a branch on a nearby tree.

Yikes, I think to myself. I better get busy and study up on something. Anything. What if my kid asks me another question and I can’t come up with an answer. Sure, he didn’t believe my answer this time, but I came up with something and feigned confidence. When I figure out what that green stuff on the tree is, I’ll just toss it into a conversation some where and correct myself without admitting error. Right?

Well, it turns out there is such a thing a tree mold. Thank you Google. Maybe I do know everything, except of course the names of the all the Transformers, but come on, I’m looking at names like Mudflap, Soundwave, Grimlock and Waspinator. Any mom would struggle with those.

So I’ll jump around on Google tonight, just in case. I’ll just pop in any old phrase and search. Hmmm, the mating rituals of the preying mantis. That has come up recently. We found one on the screen door and we had to move it before the dog saw it and decided to bat it around the yard for a while or have it as a treat. As I carried it gently across the lawn, my son asked where his mom and dad were. I said I was sure they were just over there, in the direction we were headed.

“Does he have a honey?” My son asked.

“A honey?”

“Like daddy is to you.”

“Oh, a honey. Right. Well, maybe she’s over here too,” I say as I place the preying mantis on a nearby bush. I didn’t want to mention that I may be saving a she, not a he, and she has probably bitten the head off her honey already, so he won’t be joining her for dinner. But according to the website Wonderworld.com that turned up on my Google search, which I promptly did right after my son went to bed because he was sure to revisit the saga of the lonely preying mantis again this week, it’s not very common for the female preying mantis to bite the head off the male in the wild. It occurs much more frequently when the mantis’ are in captivity. Whew, I don’t have to explain that, for now. I can just tell my son that the preying mantis is a solitary creature, he hangs alone. To which my son will inevitably comment on how boring it is to hang out alone and then he’ll ask, ‘why don’t I have a brother or a sister to hang out with?’ At this point, I will bring the conversation back to tree mold. I will tell my son that I looked it up on the computer and that tree mold does exist and that’s what we saw on the tree the other day, and I was right, and did he want to go looking for more tree mold? He’ll say cool, because he is 5, and I can coast on that for a while, until the next sweat inducing question comes along. I give it 10 minutes, wish me luck.

Honorable Mention in LA Parent Magazine's Mom Who Write Contest

Toddlers vs. Pets

I have come to the conclusion that toddlers are very much like cats. Now I’m not saying I should treat my toddler like a pet, although I do believe in treating my pet well and with lots of love, nor do I think I should push my toddler off the couch when he puts his little butt in my face, but there have been many moments since the birth of my son when I have thought to myself, these two, the cat and the kid, are shockingly alike. I feel that I must reiterate, I do not think I can leave my child unsupervised while I go to the store or say, to Europe, but on a daily basis, it turns out that the years of taking care of my cat were pretty good preparation for taking care of my son.

Let me give you some examples to back up my logic. I learned, over the years, that my cat does not want me to tell her when to eat. She wants her food left out so she can graze at her leisure throughout the day. With my son, this is slightly altered, but for the most part, he’s a grazer. He doesn’t want to sit still for a meal; he is in perpetual motion. So, if kids need three meals and two snacks a day, a nap and lots of entertainment, those meals and snacks seem to be best administered by leaving a bowl of food out and accessible at all times, so he can grab at it between our laps around the house or the yard or the neighborhood.

When my cat was younger, she used to like to bat at the roll of toilet paper, pull it off the holder and tear it apart. Hmm, suspiciously, just like my son. Now, kitty cat outgrew this behavior long before my son in grew it or grew into it, or something like that. So it’s not a learned behavior; both cat and kid seem to be instinctively from the same school of thought. Unfortunately for the grown people in the house, that means the roll of paper stays off the holder and up on the counter, annoyingly out of reach from the sitting position on the toilet.

My son likes stickers but gets crazy, screaming mad and jumps up and down when they get stuck to him, almost like my cat. Instead, she runs in circles when they get stuck to her paws. My son sometimes snuggles tightly in my arms when he wants to feel cozy, my cat snuggles up on my head while I’m trying to sleep when she needs to feel the same way. You see, different, but not really.

If you are not familiar with cat behavior, I can tell you that they love you all the time but they only show it when they are in the mood. Suspiciously, when I ask for a hug or a kiss from my son and he is not in the mood, he tells me ‘way’, as in get out of my.... Of course, when I least expect it, I’ll get a big hug and a juicy kiss for no reason at all, from my son, not from my cat.

I used to joke that my cat understood the word ‘no’ but would pretend that she didn’t just because she could. She’s very smart and will stop in her tracks when I say ‘no’, but then she seems to quickly realize that she doesn’t actually need to listen. She understands that she can pretend to not know what I mean when I say ‘no’. My son does exactly the same thing. So, I do exactly the same thing with both my son and my cat. I remove the little being from the situation that required a ‘no’ in the first place. There is usually much hissing and moaning, but they both seem to get over it pretty quickly. Which leads me to my next comparison, grudges. I’ve heard people say that cats punish their people for bad behavior, like not cleaning the little box or not refilling the water bowl, but I’ve never found cat poop in my shoe. I’ve just never had that issue with my cat, or my son. My boy is happy to walk around all day with a poopy diaper if it means he doesn’t have to stop moving. But if I do insist on a diaper change, there is much hissing and moaning, however as soon as I place him back onto the floor, my son is off and running. The incident is forgotten as he leads me by the finger into the next room he’d like to tear apart. I guess I’m pretty lucky that my cat responds the same way, although she might not if she was wearing a diaper that had to be changed, but she seems to forgive and forget pretty quickly.

My son used to claw his way up my husband’s body as soon as I said the word bath, as if daddy could save him from the dreaded ritual of washing. Oddly, bath is also a word that my cat recognizes, and when I used to try to give her a bath, she clawed her way up anyone or any piece of furniture that she thought could save her from the dreaded tub. I’ve since given up on trying to bathe my cat myself, but you’ll be happy to hear that I have not given up on trying to bathe my son.

I feel I need to promise you that my son is my world and I spend countless hours just staring at him in amazement, so please don’t call child protective services because you think I have left him alone at home with an open refrigerator and a litter box in the corner. I would also like to say that my husband does not like my comparison of cat and kid, and he just recently pointed out that we have not had to treat our son for worms. Now, I know you are thinking exactly what I’m thinking, we have not had to treat our son for worms, yet.