he's good. he's very good.

I am sick this weekend. I caught from Andy. It's a doozie. I feel rotten.

And all I want to do is lie in my Lazy Boy and be listless and sluggish. But Andy is incapable of leaving me alone. He is with me always. If I'm on the couch, he's pressed up against me. If I'm in bed, he's pressed up against me. And it's a wonderful thing 99% of the time, because I love having him next to me to cuddle. But when I'm achy and sore and snotty and miserable, it's not as enjoyable. Because he squirms. And kicks. And wants to poke me. And play with my hair. And ask me for more juice, and gummi bears, and anything else he craves. And he can't resist harassing Nugget which causes her to jump up on the furniture onto me. And it all just sucks.

So this morning I was sitting in my Lazy Boy in a stupor, trying to rest. And up comes Andy, of course. I asked him to sit on the couch with his dad but he refused. So I let him stay for a while. And inevitably he started to squirm and kick me and wrestle with Nugget and squeal in my ear.

And after admonishing him several times, I finally picked him up and put him on the floor and told him to go play.

Of course he immediately clouded up and stuck his lip out and said, "Why are you putting me on the floor, Mommy?"

I said, "Because Mommy is sick, Andy, and you are hurting me. I don't want you up here."

And I quote the little stinker when he said, "But I just want to be loved!"

mouth!

Last night we ordered Chinese food with my parents. Andy was really riled up.

Shawn and I have a running gag about fortune cookies. Many years ago the family got together and ordered 5 meals and got 5 cookies with our orders. But when we all went into the kitchen to get our cookies, they were gone. Turns out Shawn had been secretly scarfing down all of the cookies while the rest of us were eating. And to this day I can't let it go and bring it up every time we get Chinese food. (He certainly deserves it, if you ask me.)

So last night when dinner was over we got all goofy about our fortune cookies and the two of us got up and raced each other, pushing and shoving, into the kitchen to get them.

Andy was sitting with my mom and asked her what was going on. She told him, "Andy, Mommy and Daddy are just being goofy."

She said he jumped off the couch, ran into the hallway, and screamed, "Hey you IDIOTS!"

hey andy

Yesterday we were in the car coming home from lunch at a restaurant with friends. I had the radio on and Andy was reading a book (about a duck) in his car seat.

Suddenly, the song 'Hey, Jude' came on the radio. Being one of my favorite songs, I turned it up a bit.

By the time Paul had gotten to the second verse, I heard a wail from the backseat. Andy was staring at me with his bottom lip sticking out and huge tears in his eyes, falling down his cheeks. I gasped and said, "Andy! What's wrong?"

He said, "I don't like this song, Mommy."

I figured it was really something else and Andy was only able to articulate the freshest thing on his mind - the song - to explain his misery or pain or whatever it was. So I reached back and patted his leg, told him we'd be home soon, and went back to singing Hey Jude to him.

He said it again. "I don't like this song, Mommy!" And tears again started to well up in his eyes. We were only a minute from home and for the rest of the journey his lip remained firmly in the pout position and his eyes watered.

Now I ask you, who doesn't like 'Hey Jude'?

still screwing up. me, that is.

Today I went to Petco with Nugget and Andy in tow. It was rough. I was lugging around a 28-pound bag of kitty litter, trying desperately to get assistance from the slack-jawed employees who went out of their way to ignore me, all the while watching Andy inch along the filthy floor on his belly running his hair through the dirt, shoplifting dog biscuits and secretly feeding them to Nugget behind my back.

I was fried. F-r-i-e-d.

So in the checkout line, with Nugget wrapping the leash around my leg and my shoulder partially dislocated from the weight of the tub of litter, Andy decided to start hitting the dog in the face. Just hitting her to be mean, with an evil look on his face. She couldn't understand why he was beating on her.

And I did what parents aren't supposed to do... I snapped and said, "Stop it you bad kid!"

And his face clouded up and he said, "I'm not bad!"

I immediately corrected myself and said, "No honey, you aren't bad but what you did to Nugget was very mean."

But it was too late. He pouted. Then he looked up at the cashier and said, "Hey ma'am?"

She didn't hear him, so he repeated himself. "Hey ma'am?"

Then he pointed at me and said, "Mommy hurt my feelings."

overload

I try to be a good mom when it comes to teaching my son about the world. I guess we all teach our children what we know about the world. And what I know about the world is the ocean and the wetlands. Hey, I'm a Florida Environmental Studies major. What can I say?

So when we come to the beach I really puff up like a chicken and start filling Andy's head with all of my hard-earned knowledge.

Andy knows about bivalves. He can pick them out on the beach and knows to watch as they dig into the sand. He loves sand dollars and can tell me that they're Echinoderms. He's never heard the term "seaweed" because all of my college professors objected to it. He calls it seagrass. Which it is, mind you. (He also refers to a swamp as a "wetland" and a jungle as "the rainforest". That a' boy!)

I've also been working on teaching him about shore birds. He likes the Snowy Egret, with its yellow feet. He loves Pelicans. Loves them. And this trip we've been seeing Artic Terns. I love terns. So I point them out to him often.

A little too often, I think, because yesterday as we were bobbing in the waves I said, "Look Andy! There's an Arctic Tern catching a fish!"

And he sighed. He actually sighed. And he said, without even looking at me, "You always see Artic Terns, Mommy."

Then he swam over to his dad.

emergency

We are down at the condo in Fort Myers Beach for a few weeks, enjoying a much-needed vacation.

But we had a problem. The evil chair. The evil chair is a very old, very mediocre Lazy Boy, and the mechanism for extending the footrest has been exposed. The fabric isn't covering the metal any longer. It's a hazard. And it ripped Andy's best shorts.

I was getting him off the potty (major potty success on this trip, by the by!) and noticed it. I said, "Oh Andy! That rotten old chair ripped your best shorts!"

He stuck his lip out for a second, then looked worried and said, "Mommy we'd better call the firemen to fix my pants!"

i am such a jerk

This one's a doozie.

Andy is angry at his dad again. The other night, Andy was a serious pill, and was so rotten that he ended up catching a whack on his bum. The little stinker deserved it, but for his future dignity I'll leave out the grisly toddler details of what he did. That was 48 hours ago and he's still furious with Shawn, and won't really speak to him or hug him.

When Shawn came home today, Andy was openly hostile. I asked Andy to give his dad a hug, and Andy stubbornly said, "NO!" Shawn made a sad face and pretended to cry. I said, "Oh Andy, you hurt Daddy's feelings. Go give him a hug."

And the little twerp went right up to his father and kicked him in the knee.

Yeah. What a jerk, right?

So he went and stood in the corner for a while and sobbed and said how sorry he was, and gave his father a half-hearted hug and an even more transparent apology. Then I started to get him dressed to go to his grandparents' house.

I talked to him and said what a parent should say. Blah blah blah, use your words, respect your parents, kicking is not good, pretty much everything that I know went right over his head but will eventually soak into that little skull if I say it enough times over the next ten years.

Then I said, "Andy, when you behave that way we don't want to be around you. We want you to leave." By this, I meant we wanted him to go over to his grandparents house.

But I guess that part wasn't clear because his face crumpled before me and tears came to his eyes and welled up, ready to spill out.

Brokenhearted, he said, "You don't want me here? But I live here! This is my home! You are my family!"

Oh yeah. I'm crap.