"They" need to do a better job of telling us how tired you will be once you're a mom. It's about 8:30pm and I finally got the kids to sleep after their sugar high from M&Ms, lollipops and popcorn at our friends' house. Jim is out at a business dinner. I'm debating reading, watching a show or going to bed. Of course I'm neglecting the dishes and the laundry which would require I navigate my way through a minefield of toys to get there. My girls are into Barbies and Barbies come with these teeny, tiny shoes and purses and clothes and various and sundry other accessories whose main purpose appears to be to annoy me by being left on the floor where I can step on them. I threaten the girls with throwing away any toys left out on the floor but if I followed through with that, they wouldn't have any toys left. It's an empty threat, they know it and we move on. I won't be sorry to see the Barbie stage end, however. Most of the dolls we have are never clothed due to the fact that toddler fingers aren't designed to dress themselves let alone teeny, tiny dolls. Getting a sweater on a Barbie doll that doesn't bend at the elbow is a real challenge and don't get me started on the skinny jeans they come with. As such, we have naked Barbies, who are half way anatomically correct, driving their Barbie cars, swimming in their Barbie pool and laying around on my shower floor after the girls have bathed. I'm sure the neighbors think very highly of us when they see their 5 year old son pick up a naked Barbie and stare at her plastic breasts.


Anyway, this is the first week back to school after the Christmas holiday. Monday was tough - getting up and dressed, feeding the girls and packing lunches all by 8:15 was a challenge. Ryan's protest at school in the form of major crocodile tears and screams of "mommy, don't go!" didn't help much. Follow that up with a tour of one of the private schools we're considering for kindergarten where all the kids were quiet, well behaved and attentive inside their perfectly decorated classrooms with their perfectly ironed uniforms and their four food group lunches (that last part I made up) and it didn't make for a good day. It got better from there however and we appear to be back in the swing of things. Ryan goes to "meet the new teachers", i.e. test, tomorrow at the school and I'm having anxiety dreams about it. It's kindergarten and I really need to get over it but gone are the days where the neighborhood kids go to the same school down the street. On our block alone there are 10 school age kids going to 6 different schools. And on top of picking which school, I have been worried about whether Ryan is ready for kindergarten given her late summer birthday. The private schools strongly suggest you hold those children back a year but Ryan's pre-k teacher is adamant she is ready. I tend to agree with her but what if.... Again, I reiterate, it's kindergarten and I need to get over it.


Sammie is doing great. It amazes us that just 9 months ago she wasn't talking at all other than for "mama" and "hot" (I joked that if she would have said "hot mama" a lot, I wouldn't have taken her to speech class) and now we can't get her to stop rambling. She will hold her stuffed animals or plastic horses or the naked Barbies heretofore mentioned and carry on long conversations with them. They go to school and then to the market and then the library and maybe they'll sing the Dora the Explorer song about the map a few times and then she'll go in search of a specific toy for them to play with and so on. I don't remember Ryan ever entertaining herself so long like Sammie does. She was even doing this with the race cars she got for Christmas. As an aside, the race cars and race track were from me. I was tired of the dolls and wanted to introduce something more fun, more 'boy'ish. It appeared to work well as the kids played with the cars a lot but then last week Sammie brought the red race car over to me, cupped in her little hand, and told me it was sick and I should sing it a lullaby. The most shocking thing of all was that I did it willingly.