The third night of Chanukah (which, by the way, coincided with my birthday) had me pulling the car over to the side of a snowy suburban street and announcing that there was no law — Jewish or otherwise — that stipulated that I was required to give presents to anyone, and that everyone in the backseat had ZERO chances left to be gracious about their Chanukah gifts, or we were done with this present racket for the year. PERIOD.

And I meant it.

And I was right.

From that point, my children’s present-receiving skills improved markedly. By which I mean there was no more bursting into tears or pitching of tantrums following the opening of festive holiday gifts. Gifts, by the way, that they wholeheartedly (or begrudgingly) loved and played with in the minutes and days following said tears and tantrums.

Without wanting to get into a treatise on the subject, because I’m sure there are plenty out there, I will say that I have a lot of discomfort around present-receiving culture, in particular at this time of year. I don’t like the commercialism, the impetus to go shopping because somebody has told you to. I’m a bit of a control freak and I hate clutter and waste, which means that most of the time I’d rather pick out my own stuff rather than risk the problematics of gifts I don’t want or need. With several birthdays near the end of the year and a household with strong ties to both Chanukah and Christmas, this time of year starts to feel slightly unmanageable. Years ago, Rachel and I stopped giving holiday and birthday gifts to each other: it felt too loaded, too stressful. Now, if I see something I think she’ll like, I just buy it for her, preferably in, say, July.

At the moment, though, we do buy Chanukah gifts for the kids: one modest present each night for eight nights. It’s an arrangement born out of a certain amount of compromise (Rachel, bless her, adores present culture), a nod to tradition, and at least a smidgen or two of glee and fun. In a perfect world, each gift would be thoughtfully and artfully chosen, locally or sustainably made, nonviolent, affordable, a reflection of my sons’ unique tastes and abilities, sheathed in reusable or recyclable wrapping. Each gift would provoke joy and hours of stimulating play, would broaden their worlds and fill them with extra wonder, new curiosity.

In reality, there’s an awful lot of scouring the toy shelves at Winners.

Because, you know, who has time for that kind of ridiculous? It’s a full-time job to find 16 perfect presents, and I already have a job, writing things on the Internet for free. Among other things. I mean, maybe some year I’ll get my shit together and start thinking of these things in July, but the likelihood of that happening is low. And even if I did, there’s no guarantee that those thoughtfully chosen gifts would be met with anywhere near the grace they merit.

Put simply, my kids need a refresher on their present-receiving skills.

Because, let’s face it: when you are a child (and, ahem, maybe when you’re a grownup), every wrapped present contains a pony. A full on, sparkly pony with diamonds on the soles of its horseshoes and a saddle made out of pure candy. All wrapped packages contain Barbie dream homes or life-size Lego unicorns or undefeatable, gold-plated Pokémon cards. And when that’s the case, sometimes it can be hard to unwrap Boggle. Even when the following day you will spend a rapt hour finding new words with your mother, who had children precisely so that one day she might play Boggle with them.

Nights four through eight of Chanukah involved pre-gift coaching sessions:

“What will you say when you get this present?” we asked.

“Thank you,” they droned, like the perfect little zombies of gratitude we force them to be.

“And what will you say if it’s something that you don’t like?”

“I will say, I will say,” — Rowan has thought this one through, obviously — “‘I don’t really like this present but thank you for it anyway.’”

We’re working on it. By God, we’re working on it.

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We had Blankiegate here last night and I’m blaming the kids. I mean, it’s not my blanket: I don’t carry it around the house and leave it in random places like behind the living room chairs or (once, memorably) stuffed inside the cardboard dollhouse I made with my babysitter.

I’m not the one who spreads out my blankie on the kitchen floor at 6:45 AM and then lies down on it, sucking my thumb, while I wait for my oatmeal to be ready. Is what I’m saying. By which I mean it’s not my fault if Isaac’s blanket goes missing, especially when I didn’t run gleefully and naked around the bedrooms yesterday evening with my brother (now there’s a picture), leaping from bed to bed and jostling pillows and comforters out of their normal spots before coming downstairs to eat my ritual bowl full of oatmeal for bedtime snack (I swear, if oatmeal wasn’t invented Isaac would starve to death). Only to go upstairs and insist on wearing stripy fleece pajamas in this freakish mid-March heat and to discover that my security blanket is gone (“discovered missing” – that always seemed like an oxymoron to me, but I digress).

And yet, that is not how being a parent works, of course. I mean, it’s not as though they asked to be born, I suppose, or that they ever consented to live in this house with these parents with these rules. Which I am sure seem as arbitrary to them as does to me the fact that Isaac in fact has three blankets, rectangles of fuzzy white cloth each half the size of a yoga mat and indistinguishable from each other except for the width of their satin borders. There is “the blankie I like,” with its half-inch of satin, and then there are the meh blankies that will do in a pinch, their vastly inferior inch-and-a-half satin borders rendering them much less, well, secure. Which is why neither of the “blankies-I-don’t-like” was available to pinch-hit last night, given that both currently reside with various caregivers in the event that Isaac naps while in their care.

So. Bedtime. I’d had a decent enough evening with the two of them, but at this point I was really just so happy that this time of the night had arrived and there would be cuddles and stories and quiet. And then Isaac fell into the bottomless void of anguish created by the blankie-I-like’s absence, and I pretty much fell into it right along with him. And then I grabbed Rowan’s arm and pulled him in as well. Just so everyone could share in the fun, except for Rachel, of course, who had the good sense to be out.

My first mistake was trying to rationalize with the irrational, even though I KNOW THAT NEVER ENDS WELL. I know it. And perhaps I was not entirely rational myself. Because no rational person would actually believe that a distraught four-and-a-half-year-old would stop sobbing and say, “You know, Mom, you’re right: I am responsible for my own stuff and should pay better attention to where I randomly fling the rags to which I am so passionately attached. I’ll just chill out and hunker down with this substitute afghan from the couch and everything will be just fine.”

To be honest, at first I — desperately and sneakily — offered him his brother’s yellow blanket, virtually indistinguishable — or so I tried to suggest — from his own, aside from colour and, well, the width of its satin borders. It was a cheap trick, and it was a stupid move on my part, too, because then of course Rowan had to get involved, which meant that I now had two kids with blankie issues on my hands, coupled with fast-disappearing patience. Which, combined with the tick-tick-tick-tick-tick of each passing second did not for a good combination make.

So I did what any self-respecting parent would do in the situation: I proposed cutting the yellow blankie in half so that they could each have part of it, with the idea that the child who deserved it more would protest and let the other one have it, at which point I would bestow it upon its true owner.

Okay, I didn’t do that. I yelled at them.

OOOOHHH a mommy blogger who admits online that she yelled. So edgy. Maybe now I will cop to every cliché ever derided on Salon.com and admit to occasionally being ambivalent about this entire project (parenting, not blogging, that is; oh wait…) and confess to doubts about my abilities to do this job adequately (ditto) and that I occasionally lose it and then feel bad about it. I yelled, and there were tears, and even as I yelled I knew I was yelling and shouldn’t be and so I stopped, but not before I let myself yell a little longer. OMG.

(I’m going to tell you something here that my sons are going to read in five or 10 or 20 years and be floored by, a closely guarded secret that we have kept from them: Isaac’s blankie — in fact, all three of Isaac’s blankies — actually originally belonged to Rowan. When Rowan was born, someone sent us one of the meh blankies as a baby gift, and he became attached enough to it that I panicked at the thought of ever losing it and ordered two near-replicas on eBay. And then Isaac was born, and someone sent him the yellow blankie. And then somewhere along the way, the switch occurred, and neither of them was the wiser. Until now. LUKE I AM YOUR FATHER.)

(Wait till I tell Isaac that, in fact, the store HASN’T IN ACTUALITY RUN OUT OF BROWN SUGAR.)

Hi! Blankies!

Okay, so, the rest of the evening kind of lurched and stumbled along after that, and I said sorry for yelling and everyone got some cuddles and their fingernails trimmed and eventually went to sleep, one child in particular looking very glum as he cuddled up with an extra-meh purple chenille blanket. And when he woke up, in tears, at midnight, I remained calm and I took him back into his bed and then I had a sudden flash of inspiration and reached down, down, down, into the dark space between the head of his bed and the wall and it was like I had pulled unicorns and rainbows out of my ass when I handed Isaac the blankie he likes. “Thanks, Mommy,” he said, and patted my hand before popping his thumb in his mouth and cuddling up.

As though I’d known it was there all along.

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O cosleepers! We have once again joined your ranks!

All right, who am I kidding? We’ve been cosleeping in various forms for months, now. It’s just that we’ve finally given in and consolidated the process, wrestling the spare bed up from the basement and — when a certain three-year-old deemed it “too low” — topping it with a single air mattress so that he could nestle in beside us and feel secure enough to sleep through the night. He shoves a pillow into the gap between the beds, spreads his blanket over it, and then sleeps, or tries to, at least, on the blanket-on-the-pillow, so as to be even closer to us. I am reminded of how he slept as a tiny infant, only on his back on a pillow between us. And how I thought, then, what happens when he grows?

Now I know.

Are we suckers or intensely practical? Tomato, to-mah-toe: Does it matter, as long as we are sleeping?

Ah. But. About that, that sleeping thing. You think we’d be doing more of it. Maybe we are. Maybe we aren’t. It’s hard to say. The pro of the arrangement — interior design aesthetics, obviously, aside — are that we can “parent throughout the night” (kthnxbai, Dr. Sears) without actually having to get out of bed. The con is that we are, still, parenting a fair bit throughout the night. But at least that means we can rub Isaac’s tummy or his back and shush him, and hope that he will, as we put it, “thunk back to sleep.” Sometimes he does, sometimes he doesn’t. Sometimes the thunking involves much rearranging of the blanket on the pillow and much gentle suggesting that perhaps this is not a viable arrangement. Which is met with much resistance.

It is, I admit, quite lovely to look over at his little sleeping body in the middle of the night. It’s like a little gift, a prize. But — and you can colour me grouchy on this one — it’s still a consolation prize. Like, as the lovely and amazing Rachel Turiel puts it, “walking away with the veggie chopamatic … when you really wanted the new car, or simply to still be asleep.”

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Hey, look: it’s “Rant Thursday”! (Okay, I just made that up, but all worthwhile traditions begin somewhere.) If you have something to get off your chest, now’s the time. Here’s one from me — it’s about 15 years old, but it bubbled up recently and so I have decided to release it from my psyche into the Internet, where all good things go to die. Herewith:

I had a job once, when I was 23 or so. A real, honest-to-goodness, 9-to-5, show up at the office, full benefits job. I lasted a year and a half, mostly because I was young and inexperienced and kept thinking that maybe this was how things were supposed to be. My boss was this big, burly guy who managed to con his way into the position of — I kid you not — “philosopher in residence” at an institution that shall remain nameless, which granted him office space and a stipend (a stipend! Ye gods.) to, as far as I could tell, wander around and spout aphorisms. In actuality, the philosopher-in-residence gig was just the smallest in a series of cons he was pulling off, the largest being that he was in actuality the director of a virtual policy think tank, which employed me as his glorified assistant. Because, of course, with my masters degree in women’s studies and English literature, I was ideally suited to be a policy wonk. But he liked to hire, as he put it, “smart young people to see what they could offer.” And what he offered in return was unfettered abuse and an opportunity for me to perpetuate the ongoing fraud that he was actually qualified to do his job. It got stressful after a while.

Years after I quit, I would get phone calls from shaky-sounding young women, who would ferret out my name from various employee records. “I’m just calling because I work for the Philosopher in Residence,” they would begin, and then they would querulously engage me in a reality check on the months they’d spent with the PIR: Did he shout at you, too? Did he like to belittle you in front of other men? Was he moody and inconsistent? Did his hypochondriac wife phone a half-dozen times a day? Was it him, or was it them?

“It was him, honey,” I’d tell them. “It was so, so, him.”

This past summer, I met up with one of my coworkers from that period, who had recently run into another of our then-colleagues, who had reminded her of my last day. Which was, apparently, so traumatic for the then-colleague to witness that he went home that evening and got drunk. I’ve blocked most of the details of that day from my mind, but I do remember my final exchange with the PIR. He was fuming in his office, ostensibly because his PC wouldn’t start and mostly because I was leaving him — after two months notice and complete obligations — in the lurch. His final words to me? “I am not happy.” To which I replied something like, “Oh well.” But every so often I think about what I should have said instead, and that goes something like this:

You know what? It’s not my fault that you’re not happy. It’s not my fault that your computer is broken. It’s not my fault that the massive research project you’re undertaking is a joke and that the funders are beginning to call and ask exactly what is it you’re doing with their money. It’s not my fault that the Emperor Has No Clothes, that your wife is a nutbar or that you’ve spent the last three months locked in a dark office playing Freecell for hours on end because you’re depressed. It’s not my fault that you’re a misogynistic ass with a smarter younger brother and a crushing mortgage. I will admit, for the record, that it was my fault that there was no minibus that day you were supposed to take a group of foreign executives on a tour around the city — I ordered the bus for the wrong day, but then I went back into the file after the fact and changed it so that my mistake wouldn’t show up. And maybe, just maybe, if you wanted me to stay so badly, you might consider that yelling at me in front of a roomful of people isn’t the best retention strategy on record. You’re unhappy? No kidding — if I were you, I’d be miserable, too. But guess what? It’s not my problem any more!

And then I would have skipped off, launched on my freelance career. Where, ever since, I have worked with lovely, decent people as a matter of course. Thanks to you all.

 K. Your turn.

PS: Photographs courtesy my excellent friend Julie, who designed this here blog. We are getting a series of her photographs of restaurant signs printed and framed, because every day is opportunity for a rant, or just a rest.

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Since I seem to be falling down a little bit on regular blog posts, I’m grateful to Jane, who e-mailed me today on behalf of “an online retailer of appliance parts,” to let me know “about a fun, cooking video we made that you and the readers of Mama Non Grata may find interesting.”

Intrigued? Read on: “While appliances aren’t usually associated with fun and creativity,” Jane wrote, “we decided to push the envelope and see what crazy concoctions we could cook up with our own household appliances.” The online retailer of appliance parts, says Jane, has managed to do just that with its Dishwasher Lasagna Video.

“That’s right!” says Jane. “We actually cooked lasagna in the dishwasher (and ate it too!). Yes, we’re probably a little crazy and no, there isn’t anything wrong with the oven. We wanted to do it just to see if we could. … Next up… salad spinning in the washing machine?”

Those crazy kids. I admire them, being all crazy with their onlinedly retailed appliance parts. I mean, you can’t have fun at work, after all, then why bother? I hope you enjoyed that, readers of Mama Non Grata. Now go associate your appliances with fun and creativity! Your life will be better. I swear it.

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Every so often, one is the witness/recipient of such a run of Behaviour that one is tempted to pull out one’s fingernails, just for the welcome distraction the pain might bring

You know, those days when every utterance out of a child’s mouth is a version of, “I didn’t want you to do that, and you did it wrong, too.” When every action is the equivalent of them stealing your last bite of pie, only to spit it out because it’s yucky. When they insist that the best way to show their love for you is to crash into you full speed while braying like a donkey and laughing hysterically at your bruises. When it’s all you can do to excuse yourself quietly from the room, hide behind a locked door, rub your temples and breathe and count the minutes until bedtime and the reprieve from the banshees who have taken over the household.

And then — and then — one happens upon a tableau such as this:

And, just in case you thought it was a fluke, this:

Yes, that is the big one reading stories to the little one. By reading, I mean a mixture of memorization (he’s sort of the human equivalent of a Kindle, what with all those books he’s got stored in his head) and actual, sounding-out-the-letters-to-make-a-word reading. And the little one, formerly hostile, is now rapt, in awe of books, taking my hand and pulling me to the shelf to find Sandra Boynton’s Doggie Book or one of DK Media’s thousand-plus books about trucks. His new favourite sentence (after, “Mommy go get it”): “I want to read.”

And now, in addition to saying yes, we can also say, “Go ask your brother.”

Makes up for a lot, that.

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One of my favourite Bizarro cartoons depicts two kids, dressed in shorts and T-shirts on a summer’s day, staring quizzically at a snowman on the front lawn. “Okay,” says one, “I’ll give it one more week but if it hasn’t melted by then I’m tearing it down. It’s starting to give me the creeps.”

Witness the fossilized pile of snow-cum-dirt in the northeast corner of our front yard. I smacked it viciously with a shovel the other day and barely made a dent. Everywhere else, spring has sprung: the crocuses are budding and the snow has gone. Warmth spreads, but this one, intransigent lump remains. I imagine I will look out the window in July and shrug: “Still there. Hey, are the neighbours performing another exorcism?”

Can you see where I’m going with this? All these flowers and light vying against a hard little heart of stubborn iciness? Exorcisms? Of course: the terrible twos.

They have arrived, the toddlerific moments of ridiculousness. Almost overnight, it seems. Yesterday, during what is ambitiously known as “sharing time” at Rowan’s Kindermusik class, Isaac sat in the centre of a circle of bewildered four-year-olds, desperately grabbing at each instrument and shrieking, “Mine! Mine! Mine!” As I played an alphabet game with Rowan, Isaac kept up a steady chorus of, “My T! My Q!” Last night at bedtime, he insisted on pulling up my shirt to play with my (taut, taut, washboard) stomach. When I tried to get him to stop, he screeched, “My tummy! My tummy! More tummy! Mine!”

And, just in case we weren’t sure that he is hell-bent on world domination, this morning, he looked out the window and shouted, “My moon! MY Moon!”

Oh, honey.

I won’t deny that this new season of aggressiveness has its tiresome moments. But I feel for him. He’s just capturing his first glimpse of the vastness of the world and his relative insignificance compared to it all — not just his big brother or the hidden treasures of the kitchen cabinet, but the entire damn universe, moon and all. It must be a bit overwhelming.

But, like winter, it too will pass. I’m sure there will be moments where I wish I could take the back of a shovel to the two-year-old attitude. But one day I’ll look up and think, “Hey — where did that go?” Assuming, of course, that I have not been entirely beaten into the ground with four-year-old attitude. What do they say? Hope springs eternal.

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Last night Rachel dreamt that she and Rowan were boarding a plane together, only when she took her seat he was nowhere to be found. “I tried all kinds of things to stop the plane, but to no avail,” she says. “Last thing I remember we were heading for the runway and I was convinced Rowan was in the luggage compartment, or worse.”

Welcome to Rowan’s first day of junior kindergarten.

Things started auspiciously enough, when he wandered into our room at 7 a.m. and said, “Buenos dias! Good morning, Mamas!”

But then, once he realized that today was the first day of school, it kind of went downhill. He spent much of the morning in tears, trying to convince us not to send him. In the end, I carried all 40 pounds of him the four blocks to his school, him mostly wailing along the way. Neighbours drove by in their minivans and honked and waved and smiled mournfully at us. The playground monitor shook her head kindly but knowingly.

When we got to the classroom, he calmed down a bit, and began to explore. He even played for a while with another kid, every so often letting out a post-meltdown shudder. By the time the teacher got the boys and girls (my son has entered the realm of being addressed as “Boys and girls”) to sit down, cross-legged, on the circular carpet, he was red-eyed but mildly interested. I felt kind of bad for his lovely teacher, surrounded by a gaggle of innocent three- and four-year-olds — and then a wider circle of anxious, hovering, camera-toting parents. “Could you all sit down?” she asked us. “I’m feeling a bit intimidated.”

The kids went on a tour of the school, checking out their own private playground, the gym, the library, the computer room. Poor Rowan tried to grab the hand of a little girl as they walked, but she stuck her hand behind her back. I saw him smile as the teacher got all the JKs to run “as fast as you can!” to the end of the gym and back. He wandered all over the library by himself, and skipped back to the group. As we circled back to the classroom, he started looking for the locker with his name on it. And then they all sat down and read a story about a little raccoon’s first day of school. They practiced jumping up and down five times. And Rachel and I slipped out of the room quietly. And I tried to calm the tide of rising nausea in my stomach.

We came home to Isaac, jolly as could be, hanging out with über-babysitter Clair, who was just about to take him on a walk. Shortly after they left, the phone rang. I grabbed it. It was Clair, on her cell. She had walked to the school to see what intelligence she could gather, and had talked to a set of parents just leaving. “They said that Rowan was fine. His eyes were a little red, but he was playing with another kid.”

So Rowan is gonna be okay. He isn’t going to be his classmate Owen, who skipped into the room by himself, raised his hand, and proudly told the room that that was what you did when you wanted to talk while the teacher was talking. Owen, whose mom showed up halfway through the tour, carrying a coffee. “Yeah,” she said, “he came by himself on the bus this morning so I followed later on.”

But Rowan doesn’t have to be Owen. Rowan is Rowan, and he will be fine — good, great, wonderful, even — at school. And we get to go pick him up in two hours. Keep me company until then.

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Rowan starts junior kindergarten tomorrow. We’re mostly ready. We’ve got the backpack, the lunch box, the indoor shoes, the haircut, the vaccinations. We’ve read library books with Rowan about the first day of school. We even made an appointment with the teacher to discuss the fact that Rowan Has Two Mommies (she was cool, had a kid with two dads last year). Weirder probably to her in Thunder Bay is the fact that he’s Jewish, but, no problem, more or less. “Oh,” she said, “I don’t do much for Christmas. Just the tree, and stories about Santa.” (I am now committed to showing up on major — and likely some minor — Jewish holidays with some activity for the kids.)

Rowan’s teacher also told us that the first thing she does is teach the kids how to line up. Which kind of seems terrible, as though the entire purpose of elementary school and beyond is about corralling unruly children and making them conform to society’s rules and expectations.

But — and perhaps I am exposing myself for the tyrannical parent that I am here — really, although we hate to admit it, doesn’t that make up a good chunk of the parenting we do at home? It’s just that we would never admit that it’s one of our primary activities — and, with only two instead of a dozen or two children to deal with, we don’t have to state our intentions as baldly.

Still, it’s those kinds of statements that get me fantasizing momentarily about just skipping the whole school thing — until I realize that I’m just not cut out for homeschooling. Which means I don’t want to. In any case, I know lots of homeschooled kids — and their parents seem to want them to know how to line up, take turns, speak politely to other people, and share, too.

So, we’re mostly ready. Except for how we’re not. In the last two days, two different parents on two different occasions have told us, “It’s a terrible day. A terrible, terrible day.” One of them paused for a moment. “Terrible.”

I have a sneaking suspicion they may be correct. Not because I’m paranoid (no, really), but because when we took Rowan to Winnipeg Beach Day Camp in July, he melted down in a fit of tears and screaming and kicking every single day when we left. And then, when we picked him up, he said over and over, “I don’t want to go to camp. I don’t like it when you leave me.”

With that in mind, we’ve been talking a lot about school. And, slowly, we’ve been hearing less about how Rowan doesn’t want to go, how he wants us to stay, and more about circle time and painting and toys and snack. So I’m hopeful, or slightly less unhopeful.

But I’m also prepared for all hell to break loose tomorrow.

And, not prepared at all.

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