I forgive you preschool.  Just the sight of your golden head peeking over the horizon like a seraph makes me gracious.  With a couple of free mornings every week, I’m looking forward to sitting in my coffee shop again, plinking out whatever comes to mind and dumping it into cyber space for posterity.  It’s the good life.

Have you ever felt like someone was rubbing a scouring pad over your nerves? I cannot explain how perfect an analogy that is for my life. I suddenly hate talking. Toby will not stop asking questions. Repetitive, idiotic questions. “Why are we going to move?” he says.
“We’re not moving,” I say.
“Why not?” he says.
“Because we like our house.”
“What happens when our house gets old?”
“Lots of people live in old houses. It’s fine, dude.”
“Will we take our windows when we move?”
“WE ARE NOT MOVING,” I would yell if my head wasn’t already detaching itself to escape.

Was there really a time, a severely misguided moment, that I worried Toby would never talk? Did I really lack even a shard of foresight?

Greg took me out to dinner the other night. We left the boys with a sitter so we could have big people time. (And not eat at Sonic.) I collapsed into the car seat with a huge sigh and just sort of stared blankly. He was all, “What’s wrong?” and I was all, “Do not talk to me, I’m liquefying.” I guess my continual edginess finally snapped his patience in two because he went totally Dr. Phil on me, spewing out the most annoying logic like how I need to “create boundaries” and “take charge.” It was so reasonable that I couldn’t reply, being that I was more in the mood for a maniacal rant than an actual solution. I didn’t say a single thing until after we ordered our food. Finally my “whatever, Greg” face cracked, and I slumped onto the table in tears. “I don’t know how to be better at this,” I said.

“You are a good mom,” He said. I think I’ll keep him.

This afternoon I called our little neighbor friend, Kennedi to come over. She bounced in the house all spry and happy and I realized that Toby and Charlie were their usual pantsless selves, crawling nakedly over the train tracks on the floor. It is dehumanizing to embarrass your kids, but after an emergency shorts hunt, Toby and Kennedi are in another room playing happily, while Charlie sits next to me like a cherub, probably drunk with relief that his brother is quiet.

Charlie is so competent and self-sustaining. He’s like a terrarium.

Sometimes I really do want to move. Maybe I could find some loft apartment or quiet cubicle and live all by myself. It sounds so sane and clean.

Too bad I love these people too dang much to quit.

Which brings me to why I’m writing this post. Well, first it’s my birthday and the hubs mercifully gave me my laptop and car keys in trade for the children (I love that man). Time to myself is just logistics, however, because I have a deeper motive. My “cause,” my inspiration, my muses, are blooming like fresh summer roses and I don’t want to forget a single moment.

See, I’m crying here. Even through these days of interminable sameness, there is a violent need to hold on. First, is the growing. Growing documented daily by Toby in astonished hand-to-forehead comparisons. “Everyone!” he shouted this morning outside The Snooty Pig. “I am taller than this bench!”

“You are!” I said tearfully, plopping equal parts joy and grief in my motherhood repository. The doorknob! The fire hydrant! Mommy’s bed! He checks them off like a to-do list of vertical ascent.

Charlie too is sprouting with rosy-cheeked zeal. Every day he compiles a new stream of babble into an articulate sentence. A sentence! Sometimes my expectations are so behind I almost miss it. His sparkling brown eyes flicker intensely as he repeats “Wha Poby Dooeen?” in a consecutive stream until I smack my hand to my temple and get it.

“What is Toby doing? Of course! Let’s go find out!” I take his dimpled little hand into mine and we yell “Poby! Poby, where are you?” until we hear Toby laughing behind the curtains.

Some afternoons I sit down during their rest with my good intentions, ready to clink out another piece of my cyber memoir. Charlie opens his door and hollers “hello?” down the hall infinity times. Toby bursts from his room for a mid-nap poop. I just shrug my shoulders and sigh. There is nothing lost in a house full of life, this house, with two warm babies tucked under my arms, leaning on my chest as I stroke their beautiful heads.

God is so good to me.

I know I will miss these days. Even in my current delirium there are moments when it feels good. We loiter around the house like sleepy cats, doing what we want to do. I tickle Charlie right under his collar bone until he laughs so hard he can’t breathe. Toby sits in my lap while I wash the caked dirt off of his feet with a rag. I love those things, I do. Lately, though, there is that “laying out in the sun was heavenly, but now I’m really blistered” factor stifling my pleasure.

Part of it is the constancy. My mental calendar unfolds into one long row of empty boxes marking the pilgrimage to Fall. The bleak highlights: Tues. Shopping at CostCo! Mon.-Thurs. Swimming Lessons! Fri. Trash Day! I see myself bumbling along, leap frogging from one mediocre affair to the next and hoping I don’t drown in my own guilty ungratefulness.

The kids are just always there. Toby stalks me through the house performing interrogation torture. “How big was I when you were a baby?” “Where will we move when we grow taller than our house?” “When is my room going to catch on fire?” I answer him with logic until I realize that it is not a child I’m speaking to, but a three-foot expert on all things absurd.

“You were not born when I was a baby,” I say.

“Yes I wa-as!” He says.

“If you already know, then why are you asking?”

“You are not being nice, mommy!”

Maybe I could handle the perpetual debate if Charlie wasn’t in my face slapping the keyboard and honking my nose.

I feel like I’m going crazy.

“I feel like I’m going crazy!” I go ahead and yell to two people with sudden-onset indifference.

Several summers from now I’ll be whisking my boys off to sleepovers and soccer games, choking on a stream of relentless action. I’ll wonder when I ever had time with them. Toby will clam up like a secret agent protecting his thoughts with the conviction of Jason Bourne. Charlie will only crawl in my lap to steal the remote. When that day comes I will feel sad and nostalgic and recall only the best parts of where we are now.

But today, a little withdrawal sounds like heaven.

I sputtered along as Emily’s half-hearted, second-rate running partner though our schedules were different now. Emily needed to run in the afternoon, the worst time of day for a baby. I couldn’t keep up while pushing the baby jogger, and I refused to dump a cranky infant on my husband the minute he walked through the door. Emily was my friend and it hurt to see the close of our era. We met to run here and there, but in the end, I casually drifted away.

For awhile I didn’t do much but gawk at my baby. I couldn’t be with him enough. I had no idea he would take over my heart, no my very being, with such ferocity. If I planned to do anything for myself it would not be at his expense. I hated to give up running, but in comparison, I really didn’t care.

Was there someone else as devoted to her babies as I was? Someone willing to run at odd times on low-energy, maybe even wearing mashed bananas on her shorts? To stick with it, I needed a different breed of woman. Someone whose legs only took her as far as two tiny arms could reach.

I needed another Running Mama.

I mentioned my hope to a few friends at church, and through a friend of a friend, I met my running soul-mate. When I found her, heaven itself burst into song and unfurled the rainbow of joy over my snot-crusted shoulders. Her name was Jerri, disciplined runner and mother of two.

I said “Can you be up by 6:00?”

She said “How about 5:15?”

I said, “I will cancel last minute if my baby is sick.”

She said, “Me too. Times two.”

I said, “Do you run fast?”

She said, “Let’s just stay together.”

Cue tears of jubilation.

Today was unseasonably warm so I marched Toby and Charlie outside with a rather unfriendly command to ENJOY THE FRESH AIR. (Fresh air that my germophobic self won’t completely trust since the neighborhood is trading gastroenteritis like cups of sugar.) I thought the sunny pardon from our bleak indoor netherworld would motivate self-entertainment so I could veg out under the sun. It was quiet for all of one nanosecond before Toby became Socrates, pondering life’s mysteries while flinging lumps of potting soil into the grass with a plastic shovel.

“Why are the Wonder Pets not too tough?” he asked.

“Toby, let’s have five minutes of no talking starting right… now.”

“Well, how do you grow small like a baby?”

“You don’t. Everyone is growing bigger.”

“But what about babies. How do you grow into a baby?”

“You don’t grow into a baby, babies grow into big people.”

His philosophizing was not slowed by Charlie who stomped unhappily around the driveway because his feet wouldn’t reach the trike pedals.

There are days when Toby could contemplate the theme songs of the entire Nickelodeon network and I would find it endearing. Charlie could sulk and pout while spewing caveman expletives at over-sized riding toys everywhere! and I would stroke his head gently and smile.

But not today. It is winter and my sanity dangles from a skinny, burning thread. The sun shines unexpectedly in the blue January skies and I want to enjoy it. I need to.

Real Trains For Kids
If you really hate yourself and sanity in general, you will want to buy the “Real Trains for Kids” videos. This genius took his Best Buy video recorder and parked it on tracks all over New Jersey. Hours of live train action. Literally, hours.

All About… [Fast Trains, Garbage and Recycling, Airplanes]
The “All About…” series is badly-acted and illogically-plotted, yet addictively entertaining to a three-year-old. They do contain a lot of information if you want your child to be well-versed in sanitation or railroad construction.

Mighty Machines: Diggers and Dozers
Last, the all-time most irritating video ever shot with a cam-corder and dubbed over with eye-gougingly good singing is “Mighty Machines”. Each tractor in this video has its own character voice, brilliantly performed by the same guy. This is Toby’s current favorite. You don’t have to send me a sympathy card, because I already have a stack from my mother who purchased it.

Bonus: Charlie Trash Truck
Charlie Trash Truck was conceived by a pediatrician named “Dr. Jay” who started his own production company for this one video. The show contains live garbage truck footage with lots and lots and lots of factual snippets. It is the kind of cheesy production you get when education and entertainment mingle together. The video’s salvation is an astonishingly svelte trash man named “Operator Tom”.

This is my Christmas gift to all of you mothers of boys (sorry Sarah). Consider it an hour of free babysitting courtesy of the runningmama. En-joy.