It's a Conspiracy..

I am convinced that there are nights when all three kids, Jimmy, the dog, and various outside influences have a secret meeting where they decide that they will all do their part to make sure I don't sleep. I don't know why they would do this, because I am certainly more enjoyable to be around when I have slept, but trust me when I tell you--there is definitely a conspiracy going on.

Last night, after the kids had been in bed and allegedly asleep for well over an hour, B woke up, crying uncontrollably, and Jimmy went in to see him. I don't know what conversation took place, but the end result was that B was sitting on the couch, eating a ham sandwich, at ten o'clock last night. Shortly after this, N appeared downstairs, also crying uncontrollably, upset that B was allowed to stay up, and she wasn't. Eventually, after their mother freaked out calmly explained that it was important to get a good night's sleep, the sweet little cherubs found their way back to bed.

As I finally started to get into bed a short time later, next to the loud as a freight train on steroids soft soothing snores of my husband, it was O's turn to wake up crying. In order not to wake B, I brought O into our bed. He's not two yet. He shouldn't take up much room. But he does. Surely three of us should be able to sleep comfortably in a queen size bed. But we don't.

Every time I moved to try to get comfortable, O literally moved under whichever part of me was currently not in contact with the mattress. I repeatedly moved him over, but he was not content with this. Apparently he must be touching me at every moment. This is very sweet, and normally I would love to snuggle with this sweet boy.  But the thing is, I don't like anyone touching me when I am going to sleep. At all. I guess this didn't really matter, since I wasn't actually going to sleep, as long as I was clinging to the six inches of my own bed that my not yet two-year-old had allotted me. Eventually, though, my body decided that it was too tired to care that we only had six inches on which to sleep, and I started to drift off. And as soon as I did, I heard the BEEP BEEP BEEP of a truck repeatedly backing up outside our window.

It's now one o'clock in the morning. It's a little late...or early...for a big truck to be turning around on our street, which is what I assume it's doing. They seem to be having difficulty, because the back-up sounds continue for several minutes. Eventually they pull away, and I drift off again.

Until B comes in.
"Mommy, move over"
Well, I would...if I could.
I know there's no way we're getting any sleep if we all attempt to stay in this bed, so I give B my spot, and take O to his room. I put him in his crib and lay on B's bed. O likes this slumber party idea. He wants to talk.
"Mama? B Daddy bed? Bella, N, night night. Bankie, mom? More bankie? Momma, nudder bankie? Nudder bankie!" Told you he was a hoarder.
Eventually he is quiet and I start to drift off...until I hear BEEP BEEP BEEP again. Another truck is backing up outside. You have got to be kidding me. It's now two AM.  This truck sounds bigger...and noisier. The backing up sounds stop but the truck is idling loudly outside the window, and it's not going away.

I look out the window to see a large tow truck backed up to an unfamiliar minivan parked at the corner next to our house. No one ever parks on that corner, unless we're having a party, which we're not--mine and O's slumber party aside. We live in a pretty quiet neighborhood. The closest street is a dead end, so it's not like we're even on the way to anywhere else. Who calls a tow truck at two in the morning from here?

O is now standing up, watching me watch the truck.
"Tuck mommy?"
"Yeah O. It's a truck."
An obnoxious, noisy truck.
I hear chains, more backing up, some guys talking. Do they know it's two in the morning?
I look out again and see what appears to be one of the guys from ZZ Top. Only with a significantly larger beer belly than I remember the ZZ Top guys having. And he is not a sharp dressed man.
ZZ  is attempting to hook the car up to the tow truck, though he appears to be having some difficulty. He looks in the car windows for something. There's no driver of the car around.  The only other person is another ZZ Top guy driving the tow truck. Car thieves don't use tow trucks to steal cars, right?

I hear more chain noise, more backing up.  I wish if they were going to do this--whatever this is--they would be a little quieter about it. I think they know they are being watched. I wonder if I am making them flustered. It is now well after two in the morning, I have not slept. I hope I am making them flustered. But I'm pretty sure ZZ Top is not easily flustered.

As the ZZs continue to make noise outside our windows, I remember the earlier truck backing up... and then I get it. This is not a broken down minivan getting a tow. This is a non-paid-for minivan getting a repo. I really wish the ZZ Top Repo Men had picked some other corner.

I consider going outside and telling them this. After all, it is now two-thirty in the morning. I have not slept, and O has barely slept, all because the ZZ Top Repo Men have for some reason chosen the corner next to our house as the setting for Operation Repo Minivan. I imagine word about this new location spreading through the repo community, and I picture our quiet little corner becoming a hotbed of repo activity. I am seriously thinking of going out to have a little chat with the ZZ Top Repo Men, and then I think of the chain of events that will likely occur if I leave this room. O will cry. Jimmy will (possibly) wake up, and will (eventually) wonder where I went. He will look all around the house, growing panicky with the thought that something has happened to me and that he will have to raise these children by himself. When he eventually finds me outside at three in the morning, telling the moonlighting ZZ Top Repo Men to go find some other corner, he will know for certain that I have lost the last bit of my sanity that remained.

So instead of going outside to talk to the ZZ Top Repo men, I just continue to stand at the window, and watch. I think about going downstairs and making some popcorn, but I'm hoping the show's almost over.
O is looking for an update. "Tuck mommy?"
"Yup O. The truck is still there. Can you say repo man?"
"Repo Man".
Yay O!
I love it when he learns new words.

Eventually the ZZs get the minivan hooked up, and start to pull away. I realize that, in addition to the minivan they are now towing, there is a shiny SUV on the flatbed. Yup. Repo men for sure. Finally, it is quiet again, and we lay back down.

"Night night Mommy."
"Good night O."
I am drifting off, yet again, when I hear him say,
"Night Night Repo Man".

I feel kind of bad for the people who lost their minivan, but let's keep things in perspective. After all, I lost something way more valuable.
A night's sleep.

Holy Hoarders!

I have come to the conclusion that I am raising the next generation of hoarders. This should not have surprised me, as I may have a minor tendency toward hanging onto things myself. However, I didn't think it would show itself in my children just yet. Maybe that's a sign that it's not really my fault. Maybe the fact that it's showing up so early in their young lives is a sign that hoarding is an innate trait--you either have it, or you don't. As it happens, my children--to one extent or another- have it.

Fortunately for N, she seems to have been mostly spared. Give her a couple books and a teddy bear, and she's a happy girl who doesn't need much other "stuff". She never really even had a lovey or a blanket as a baby, and even as an infant, the only thing she was perhaps excessively attached to was me--quite literally. Of course, there are the rocks she collected from the driveway when she was four, before we paved it, which she still has on a shelf in her room...along with the pine cones...and the sea shells...and the glass pebbles from a friend's fish tank. But I'm pretty sure those things are all considered collector's items, so she's not a hoarder. She's a collector.

O, on the other hand, is obviously an aspiring hoarder. For the past few months, he has been attached to blankets. This was incredibly cute when he walked around the house dragging one blanket behind him. But then he needed two. And eventually, three. At this point, he requires every child sized blanket in the house to be in his hands and/or in his crib, or he will repeatedly and with increasing intensity cry "Bankie!" until he gets them. He is the third child. Can you guess how many baby and child sized blankets we have in our house? I'll tell you how many. Too damn many. It would simplify my life greatly if I would get rid of some, but you will probably be shocked to learn that I am emotionally attached to most of them. Oh sure, I should get rid of some of them, but they were all either made by friends or family, bought off my baby registry, or stolen accidentally taken from the hospital after my children's births, when I was in a post c-section, drug induced haze. How can I part with those?

Besides, I see O's hoarding tendencies as a sign that B is sharing his brotherly knowledge with him, since B has been hoarding things since he was an infant. We could hear him crawling into the room before we could see him, because he always had an object in each hand--often a plastic cup, or a block, or a toy car. It's so exciting when your baby starts crawling. And excited we were "Aww, here comes B!" Clunk, clunk, drag, clunk...Then he started walking, and at a stage when most kids want a teddy bear to go to sleep with, he would have to have two plastic cups, three blocks, four cars, and at least one dinosaur, right next to him, all night long. If one fell out of his crib, he would wake up crying and knew exactly what was missing. Now, at three, he is well past the crawling stage, and mostly past the walking and running stage. In fact, most of the time he appears to half leap, half fly from one place to another. This is an amazing talent that three-year-old-boys have. And when he is leaping and/or flying, he almost always has something in his hands. Or several somethings. Today he appeared to be playing with a boot (cause you know, we don't have any real toys in our house.) Upon closer inspection, I discovered that this was not just any boot. This boot was home to an airplane, a tractor, a whistle, a whisk, two dinosaurs, one sock, and one Baby Jesus.

Yes, he plays with Baby Jesus. Jimmy and I have had discussions about whether or not this is appropriate. Jimmy's feeling is that it's JESUS, and Jesus should not be a toy. But this Jesus is, in fact, a toy. He came with a Nativity set made for kids. I did hope Jesus would be packed away with all the other Christmas stuff by now, but B grew attached to Baby Jesus and won't let me put him away. Don't worry--Mary and Joseph are still hanging around, too. In fact, I think the whole Nativity posse is still floating around our house. Today, several of them went in the car with us to get N at school, and when I parked and opened the door, Jesus fell out. So B did what he always does when he loses something. He screamed for it, "Jesus! Jesus! Jesus!"
"It's OK B! I have your TOY BABY JESUS right here", I told him as I gave Jesus back to him, and smiled at the other parents around us. At least it was at school and not Church, though now that I think about it--where are you more likely to get in trouble for yelling Jesus' name these days?

After we got home, Baby Jesus was missing, and we discovered that he had been accidentally left outside. Once he was brought in, B and O started to fight over Him, with O yelling  "Baby! Baby!" and B responding "My Jesus! He's mine!". I eventually took Baby Jesus away, and thought it might be a good opportunity to put him away until next Christmas, but I think Mary and Joseph are still in the car, and I didn't feel right about separating them. Plus, I think they're probably good to keep around. God knows this family needs all the help it can get from that family.

Maybe Jimmy does have a point, though. Baby Jesus shouldn't be getting thrown around the car, along with his Holy parents, the angel, the wise men, and the donkey. And he most certainly should not be getting dropped outside, or left outside, or be the center of a tug of war between brothers. I do have some guilt about all this. But then again, I'm Catholic. I have guilt about everything.

Isn't the important thing that our children want to hang out with Jesus? Especially because they are, after all, our children, and this is Jesus. I just wish they wouldn't fight over Him. I have thought of getting them each their own Jesus, but I think if you have two of the exact same Baby Jesus, people are allowed to call you a hoarder. Besides, I don't think that sends the right message. They need to learn that there's plenty of Jesus to go around.

So I think Jesus and his family are probably here to stay, at least until after next Christmas. If Jesus is ok with being carried around in a boot amidst dinosaurs, trains, and kitchen utensils, then who am I to try to put him away in a box?

Besides, God knows hoarders need love, too.