This is Mir. This is Mir wrangling children on a school morning before she’s had some caffeine. Any questions?

Me: Put that Polly down and get yourself downstairs to eat right now!
Her: But she wants to come too!
Me: FINE. But get down here.
Him: Vitamin! Vitamin! Vitamin! Vitamin!
Me: I’m getting it, buddy.
Her: Mama! Come look!
Me: What? No! Come down here!
Him: Gimmegimmegimmegimme!
Her: Mama! You have to see!
*Monkey drops his vitamin on the floor*
Me: Chickadee! Has Polly done something amazing and stupendous that is far more amazing and stupendous than all the things she did upstairs? Did she come to life? Is she wielding a little knife? If the answers to these questions are “no,” I don’t care.
*Monkey drops his vitamin on the floor*
Me: Put that in your mouth right now or I’m going to put it in your ear.
Her: Nooooo! But she did something you can’t do! She did a double flip down the stairs and you couldn’t do that!
Me: Yeah, well, that’s because I’m not made of plastic.

So tired. Need more tea. And sleep. But sleep is unavailable, so I’ll make do with tea.

Went to bed too late. Fell asleep; woke to a small boy at my bedside.

“I’m poopy! Clean my butt!” I am so using that against him when he’s a teen.

Cleaned, changed, and tucked him back into bed. Went back to sleep; woke to a small boy at my bedside.

“Bad dream!” A quick rock in the chair and tucked back into bed. Eventually I fell asleep; he came back.

“Get in!” I snarled. He stole the covers. *weeping*

So very tired.

(Happy, Philip?)

This morning started out like most other school mornings: Monkey came and had his snuggle and play time in bed with me, and once we heard Chickadee’s alarm, we went to get her up. She didn’t want to get up (shocking). She was too tired to get dressed (astonishing). She couldn’t possibly brush her teeth (how interesting).

It was when I had half-dragged her to the bathroom and she stood on the stool, listing to one side, toothbrush dangling from her mouth, and she started crying that she needed to lie down, that I began to suspect something was amiss. Fine, go lie down. While you’re at it, hold this in your mouth for a few minutes.

Then came the moment every mother dreads. No fever; go to school. High fever; commence coddling. Low fever? Crap. Barely even a fever, really. Lower than what the school considers the cut-off point, even. Maybe I could give her some cold medicine and still send her…? It was at this point that my inner Mama Bear smacked me upside the head. Hello! a shrill voice scolded me. She’s only been up for ten minutes! By this afternoon that fever will be taking charge!

Hmph. And here I’d had a big day of… ummmm… stuff… planned. Oh well.

Monkey ate his beloved poptarts and chattered on while I packed his lunch and Chickadee lay in bed with a book. I dosed her up with medicine before we left. We ran him over to school, then returned home.

For a little bit, it was lovely. Then the medicine kicked in. Then, by all accounts, Chickadee was perfectly fine! She played and read and asked for more breakfast and generally made me wonder why I’d let her stay home.

Only now, she’s parked on the couch in front of the television, and getting shorter by the minute. I think the medicine is starting to wear off, and it’s taking with it her resolve to remain upright. I’m probably a lousy mother for being delighted to see her clearly unwell. But those few hours of normalcy were making me feel like I’d been duped. If you’re home sick, be sick, dammit!

I am so going to hell.

pick·y: adj. Excessively meticulous; fussy.

I thought I knew picky. I thought I knew picky eaters. And then, I met my son.

It is at the core of maternal urges to nourish one’s young. My youngest has stymied my attempts from the beginning. He had multiple nursing issues, and a delightful habit of projectile vomiting. When we finally moved on to solids, he loved to grab the spoon from my hand… so that he could play with it. Cheerios on the tray? Those were fun to stick to his head, sure. Then came the food allergies. And somehow we arrived here, at age four-and-a-half; and while I refuse to battle my child over food, I am still amazed.

Sometimes, when the job search seems particularly bleak (when would that be? oh, all the time, thanks), I consider posting a billboard outside the house. “COME SEE THE AMAZING AIR-EATING BOY! BEHOLD: 38 POUNDS OF NOTHING BUT AIR AND POP-TARTS! JUST $1 TO WITNESS THIS MIRACLE WITH YOUR OWN EYES!” I could continue staying home, then. I mean, sure… I’d probably have to mop more often, what with all the people trampling through, but I could live with that.

Monkey has consistently ridden the bottom of the growth chart. The doctors assured me that as long as he was gaining (be it ever-so-slowly or not), I shouldn’t worry. And I’ll confess that if he’d been my first I probably would’ve dropped to the floor and died long before now, what with the constant worry that he would one day simply evaporate. But I’m more easygoing now, or at least I have fewer brain cells left to assign to issues like this. He’s happy, he’s relatively healthy, yes. But he’s just so weird.

My boy just loves him some pop-tarts. Mmmm mmmm good! And he’s picky, remember. So you’d think he’d only like certain pop-tarts. But you’d be wrong, because he’s picky but he’s weird. Any fruit-flavored pop-tart is fine and dandy with him. He hearts pop-tarts. He eats one or two for breakfast every single day. (Yes, please send me hate-mail about what horrible crap pop-tarts are. Given that it’s the only meal the child can be counted upon to eat, I will get right on eliminating those from his diet.) Monkey loooooves blueberry pop-tarts! He will not eat blueberries. Monkey loooooves cherry pop-tarts! He will not eat cherries. Monkey loooooves strawberry pop-tarts! He will not eat strawberries. Are you seeing a trend, here? Anyone? Weird.

I think some of it is a textural issue. Similar to the pop-tart phenomenon, Monkey loves fruit-flavored yogurt, but only if it is so processed and smooth that there isn’t a single tiny particle of identifiable fruit matter remaining.

But I shouldn’t complain about fruit. He eats apples, now. And for a long time, he wouldn’t eat any fruit at all, so this is a major triumph. But I’ve been putting the same apple in his lunch bag for nearly a week, now. He hasn’t touched it. When I ask if he still likes apples, he says he does. “Why haven’t you eaten it, then?” I asked.

“I dunno,” he said, deep in thought. Then: “I guess I wasn’t feeling apple-y today.”

In case you’re wondering, he hasn’t been feeling sandwich-y or green bean-y or cheese puff-y or raisin-y or even tortilla chip-y this week, either. The child regularly returns home from school with a full lunch bag. If I tuck a yogurt in there, it’ll be gone. (And as that can’t be resealed, I have no guarantee that it’s even being eaten; it’s possible it just gets tossed after one bite.) Everything else is right there. And the yogurt? 4 ounces. So let’s see… if he eats the entire container… 16 ounces in a pound… that means he’s chugging along an entire day at school on the power of… 1/152nd of his body weight in nourishment. Call me crazy, but that just seems impossible.

There are foods that Monkey loves besides pop-tarts. Sure. They include: crackers, bread, yogurt, cheese, french fries, and mac-n-cheese. And there’s a secondary tier of foods he’ll sometimes eat on alternate Tuesdays when the moon is full and Mercury is in retrograde: apples, salad, hot dogs, cold cereal, grilled cheese, McDonald’s cheeseburgers, and sunflower butter. And altogether, that’s not such a horrible diet. Throw in a few glasses of milk and a multivitamin and call it good, I say. Me, I have a serious ongoing relationship with food. I have my favorites, but I’ll try anything, and I like most everything. I just cannot understand the complete lack of pattern when it comes to this kid’s consumption.

The rule in our house is that you taste everything on your plate. Once tasted, if you don’t like it, fine; you don’t have to eat it. But you must taste it. Tonight was a typical dinner in my house.

Before dinner: With apple crisp baking in the oven and meatloaf being reheated in the microwave, Monkey walks into the kitchen and announces “Ewww, what stinks?”

During dinner: I spend most of my meal explaining that french fries are made from potatoes, and mashed potatoes are like smushed-up french fries, and besides that, they’re really yummy. Furthermore, meatloaf is really just like a cheeseburger except without the cheese, with the added bonus that you can dip it in ketchup, Nature’s perfect condiment! It’s a hard sell, and Chickadee and I clear our plates while Monkey whines that he doesn’t like this, he doesn’t want this, why did I make this (“To torture you,” I answered. “Mama, did you really?” counters Chickadee)! Nothing touched his lips until the final minutes of the meal. Monkey took a deep breath, stabbed his fork into his mashed potatoes and extracted a tiny morsel, and put it in his mouth.

Shock registered on his little face. “Yum!” he said.

“See? I told you that you’d like that! Have some more!”

“No thank you,” he demurred as he set down his fork. “May I please be excused?”

Weird.

After dinner: We are in the middle of our bedtime reading when Monkey bursts into tears. “Honey!” I cry out, “What’s wrong?”

“I’m… I’m… hungry!” he snuffled.

“I see. Do you think maybe you should’ve eaten more dinner?”

“No! I think maybe I’d better go to sleep right now so I can wake up and have some pop-tarts!”

Well, then. I have to give him credit for knowing what he wants, I guess.