brothers

twinsies, both at 14 months, give or take. if thomas keeps eating the way he does (he weighs 25 1/2 lbs) it won't be long before people really think they are.

lightning mcqueen it was

there are other, better photos but they're stuck on my camera and will remain there until i can find the silly rip cord thingamabob that i ALWAYS lose. belch.
we had a great halloween - a party at tayloe's school and then trick or treating on the lawn at UVa. the dazed look on little tayloe's face kinda says it all - he's always been overwhelmed in crowds. so many people, so much to do, never really sure where to start. we guided him along and he had fun. after about 45 minutes he took off his costume and told us he was ready to go home.
thomas, on the other hand, could have sat in his stroller batting his balloon and drooling on his lollipop all day. i thought he was going to buck at being in his zebra costume, but he didn't mind it at all. as long as he has a snack and someone else is doing the work he's perfectly content.
saturday night we'd planned on trick or treating in our little town of scottsville, but rainy weather and the bucket of halloween candy we already had helped us change our minds. instead, we watched charlie brown and got tayloe really excited for trick or treaters - all 2 of them - to come to our house. he kept calling them 'tricker trickers' and that combined with the way he sat peering out the front window waiting for them kinda melted my heart.

trick's on me

the lightning mcqueen halloween costume that's sitting on the counter staring at me just told me what i already know.
i am a big, fat sucker. and that i'm a lunatic because i'm talking to a foam car. and because i'm telling you that i'm talking to a foam car.
i paid $40 and an additional $15 in shipping- $55 total, more than i paid for my last pair of shoes - for this thing. $15 to ship foam people. think about that for a minute.
it came today and was waiting for tayloe when he woke up from his nap - the finest synthetics $55 can buy, bright cherry red, the stupid lightning mcqueen expression smeared on its front just like in the movie. the kid's been pretending he's a race car - this race car - for the last 5 weeks so i didn't really think it was unreasonable to assume he'd be excited to see it.
oh but wait. 3 year olds are complete psychopaths.
he came into the kitchen. stared at it for a few minutes. sucked down a cup of milk. stared at it some more. finally, after some prompting, he put it on, ran around the house once making loud engine noises and then quietly took it off in his brother's room and left it on the floor. i'm sure i don't have to tell you that boys aren't quiet when they're excited about something.
he didn't say he didn't like it, but i'm gonna guess that's because he didn't want to hurt my feelings. it was that obvious i was more excited than he was.
of course, i know this game. your choices as a mother are to either learn to handle psychosis or put your head in a 500 degree oven. i wiped the disappointment off my face, didn't say 'DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA HOW MUCH THIS THING COST?' even though it was on the tippy tip tip of my tongue and moved on.
will he wear it to his school's halloween party tomorrow? to halloween festivities tomorrow evening? trick or treating saturday? who knows. tonight as i tucked him in he told me he wanted to be a ghost so he could say boo. (do. not. strangle. do. not. strangle. do. not. strangle.)
later i picked lightning mcqueen up and put him on the counter. where he sits now. still staring.

fall

a third

aw, your boys are so pretty. you should have a girl!
people say that to us a lot. like it's something we can just order up. sometimes i say 'i know' because of course i think my kids are beautiful and mostly perfect and who doesn't want more of that.
sometimes i balk because let's be honest - the thought of another child, girl or boy (but mostly boy), makes me shake uncontrollably. if i did have a direct line to God, i don't think the very first thing i'd ask for would be another baby. peace, health, happiness, a nice pair of winter boots and then maybe ...
see i can't say no definitively (though tayloe seems to be able to just fine, which poses another kind of problem. but forget that for now & play along). it's something about the 13/14/15 month age. a baby quickly, almost too quickly, stops being a baby and starts being a toddler (mines not actually toddling but again, play along). pretty soon the crib will be down and the baby clothes packed up and it'll all be behind us. totally done. i know what it feels like to be OK with something - ready to leave one thing behind and leap eagerly toward the next. i don't feel it.
here's the part where you start to think i'm certifiable. even at the end of the worst days - when everything is a complete mess i'm still not able to say no. there's barf on my favorite shirt. no more kids. i haven't slept a full night in 3 years. no more kids. someone's always whining in my ear. no, no, no, no.
well, maybe ....
the other day at starbucks a woman asked me how many children i had. know what i said? 3. i know! i've lost my mind.
the cherry on top of the crazy lady sundae is that i'd be perfectly fine with another boy. sometimes i even think i'd prefer it. somebody stop me.
i can barely make sense of this myself, so don't you go trying. maybe it'll pass and i'll suddenly have that OK feeling. i don't know.
here's what i do know. i know myself better and love myself more today than i did yesterday, three days ago, three years ago. i had no idea what i was capable of, good and bad, and i'm not sure i ever would have discovered it if i hadn't chosen this path. i'm grateful for every moment of this life and if one day there's more, well that'd just make it all the better.

9 lives

it's almost halloween, so allow me to scare you. god knows the incident i'm about to recap was so crap-in-the-pants frightening there's enough yikes to go around.
a few weeks ago tayloe, thomas, below mentioned johnny and i went for a walk along the river. beautiful day, happy boys, wet dog - life was fine. and then everything wasn't.
thomas was in the stroller and johnny was off his leash retrieving tennis balls. tayloe was tagging along behind collecting sticks and walnuts. with an arm full, he asked me to stop and help him. i took my hand off the stroller to turn around and see what exactly he needed and in that moment, johnny's wet seeming 1,000 lb tail whopped the stroller and sent it rolling down the riverbank and plunging into the cool early october waters. i hadn't put the foot break on.
t2 screamed, i screamed, thomas screamed and as i ran down the bank after it i watched as the stroller, with our 13 month old baby strapped into it, sunk into chilly early october river water. i dove in but struggled to pull the stroller up and flip it over. maybe it was tayloe's shrieks from the side. maybe it was just pure adrenaline. the only thing i could think to do was dive under and shove it up from underneath. so i did. it bobbed (no pun intended. at all. although that is kinda funny) to the surface and there was my baby boy, drenched and shivering and shrieking, but very much alive. little tayloe was very much alive too, sobbing from the shore and yelling 'my baby brother, my baby brother!' i'd say, 'it's OK, he's OK,' & he'd sob back , 'mama he's NOT OK. he's SOAKING WET.' well yes, there's that.
what happened after that is kind of a blur of panic. i ran everyone back to the truck, cranked the heat and had them both in a hot bath in what seemed like minutes. as quickly as it had happened it was over and everything was back to normal.
except for me. tayloe came in from his office and said i looked like i'd seen a ghost. a ghost that tried to drown me. and maybe rip my heart out.
even after thomas was warmed up, in pjs and tucked into bed, i couldn't stop imagining what he would have looked like if he'd stopped breathing. i imagined what i'd of done, how absolutely positively dreadful it all could have gone. sometime around 1 a.m. i snuck into thomas' room, snuggled him in my arms and sat with him in the dark for nearly an hour.
because everything is ok and i eventually was able to get the shocking images out of my mind, i can look back on it with a little humor. no one else was around, but had they been the scene surely would have looked like a total cluster *&uck. a baptism gone terribly, terribly wrong. for days after t2 told everyone he saw that his baby brother rolled down the hill in his stroller and landed in the river. nice.
my iphone, which was in the strollers' cup holder, went dead for 2 days and then slowly came back to life. still, it shows signs of trauma. when i try to open certain applications it tries, blinks a few times and then goes black. i can almost hear it saying, 'hey lady, i've got your facebook status update: 'put the f'ing foot break on!'
and i rue the day when thomas tells me he's been having water submersion nightmares. and then rolling down a hill uncontrollably nightmares. and then soaking wet & freezing nightmares. and when all of this comes after we've just gotten over the you hate me and are trying to kill me nightmares.
when i look at this pic, taken by my mother in law this weekend, i see sweet smiling alive thomas and i feel overwhelmed with relief and joy and love.
that's my thomas. toughest kid on the block.

Here's johnny

Life is incomplete without a dog, I just didn't expect to get so much
dog when we got johnny. He's not quite 7 months, weighs about 85 lbs
and has at least a mile of skin to grow into.
Now I think every dog is the best dog I've ever had, but johnny
seriously is a fantastic dog. Sure he busted through the bathroom
window for no good and he can destroy a sippy cup in 2 seconds flat.
But he's all love. Thomas can put his whole head in johnnys mouth (not
that he has, er hum..) and his only reaction is a tail wag. His goofy
laid back personality so compliments our family it seems like he's
been with us forever.
Of course there will always be wolly, who was unique in a completely
different way. But I think if wolly could have hand picked a dog for
us, even he couldn't have denied the complete awesomeness of johnny
cash.