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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

… Rowan, thankfully, obliged me by throwing a monster tantrum in Robin’s Donuts. We went, as is the custom, before his Kindermusik class at 5:15. He picks out a doughnut, eats the frosting and some of the other slightly healthier fare we bring along, we go for a pee in the only slightly disgusting washroom, and then we walk across the strip-mall parking lot to music class. It’s a beautiful ritual.

Today, things started well enough, except that the woman behind the counter gave Rowan the vanilla rainbow-sprinkled doughnut at the end of the row, and he wanted the one in the middle. I managed to distract him long enough to get us seated at our usual table, and placed the offending pastry in front of him. “I don’t want this one,” he said, sinking his teeth into the frosting. And I thought he was done. He nibbled at the rainbow sprinkles for a while, ate some goldfish crackers and a dried apricot, and then remembered that he was not done.

“Not this one,” he said, poking at the hunk of fried dough in front of him. “I want the other one.”

“I’m sorry, sweetie,” I said, completely irrationally. “That’s the doughnut we have.”

We repeated this exchange a couple more times with only slight variations, until he swept the doughnut off the table with the back of his hand, and it flew about ten feet in the air and landed on the floor near the display case. Then, to really drive home his point, he ran over to his vanilla rainbow special and kicked it several times before falling onto his knees, sobbing, in front of it, and shredding it with his hands. “What’s he doing?” a little girl at the next table kept asking her mom.

I came over, picked up him and the doughnut, and carried both over to the garbage can, into which I managed to drop the latter.

“I want my doughnut!” shrieked my son. “I need a new doughnut! I need a new one! Huhhhh-huuunh-huunnnh-huuuu-uh-uh-uh!” (“What’s he doing?”)

I held him and nodded and shushed him as he sobbed and snuffled and railed against my chest (“What’s he doing?”), smiled and rolled my eyes at the other patrons, and gathered up our stuff. No visit to the washroom. Never even made it into the Kindermusik lobby, although Rowan did make a spectacular welcoming committee as he sat sobbing in my arms on the stairwell as his various classmates filed past him. (“The exact same thing just happened at our house,” one of the mothers whispered conspiratorially as she guided her daughter down the stairs.)

And then we drove home, Rowan shuddering and eating goldfish crackers in the back seat.

“Mom?” he said, and I steeled myself for another round of doughnut talk. “Mom? Patrick,” — the little boy with whom he shares a babysitter, with whom he’s spent almost every weekday for the past two years and whose dad just got a new job — “Patric is moving to a different city and I don’t want to miss him.”

Poor guy.