August

August is a month in which I have accomplished pretty much zero.  It’s dumb when you pay nearly a grand for your baby to go to a babysitter, but  you still get nothing done because you have to watch your preschooler because his stupid school doesn’t start until like four weeks after every other school in the city starts, ARGH.  I’d have liked to have delayed the babysitter by a month, but she has to pay her bills, and she would have had to find somebody else for that slot, leaving us babysitter-less, so there goes a grand on essentially nothing.

(Not nothing.  It’s been a useful period of adjustment for the baby and the sitter.  She’s great, he likes her.  He can already respond to her instructions given in Spanish.  She likes him, too – he cracks her up.)

(Jack is hitting me with a blow-up plastic airplane.  When does school start again?  Oh – September 7th?  *weary sigh.*)

While Jack continues to be trying, as in trying my patience or trying to get put in a box and mailed to China, Liam is also trying, but in a much more delightful way.  For some reason I seem to have much more capacity to cheerfully and continually redirect a toddler away from putting forks in the electrical outlets than I do to cheerfully and continually reply to the fifty zillionth whining question in a row from a much put-upon preschooler.  Liam occasionally wordlessly whines, but it’s usually a brief affair.  More often, he walks around sweetly chirping, picking up things and putting them down in another room.  (He takes very seriously his job of constant redistribution of our home’s contents.)   He says lots of words – Ball, Bottle, Bubble, Mama, Dada, Dog, Cat, Cow, Moo, Shoes, Milk, Cup, and on and on.  He usually wakes up before Jack, and will sneak down the hall toward’s Jack’s room when we’re not looking, giggling and shouting “GACK!  GACK!”  He loves his big brother.  Even when they’re fighting, which they often are these days.  Jack’s in the “I hug my brother, I hug him tight, and tighter, and TIGHTER AND I SQUEEZE HIM SO HE CAN’T BREATHE, MWAHAHAHAHA” stage of brotherly love.  He walks the tightrope of being a fierce defender and a jealous competitor.  I walk the tightrope of letting them hash it out and interfering when it goes too far.

So, the beginning of my 3L year has gone just fine.  I’m trying to enjoy all of this extra time with my children before I begin billing hours (although they are trying their darnedest to make sure I don’t enjoy a thing).   Aaaaand they’re fighting over a DVD.  So I’d better go intervene.