Gabe Makes Pooping His Bitch, And Norah Gives Girls a Bad Name

It's been a rough past few days, and I'm not sure if there's an end in sight. The middle of the night Friday, Gabe woke up with a stomach ache and fever. The fever kept up, off and on, through the weekend and was mostly gone today, but now he's got some of that "upset stomach" they refer to on the Pepto Bismol commercials. The kind that explodes into the toilet and leaves sticky brown splatters that won't wash down all over the bowl.

But the good news is, even fighting a case of the hershey squirts, Gabe hasn't had an accident yet! He's gone two full weeks without any form of accident, and we've even gotten to the point where we don't have to bribe him with candy every time he makes it to the toilet on time. If we can just convince him that he's capable of pulling his own pants up, and then teach him how to wipe himself, then life will be just that much easier, and we, as parents, will only have two butts to worry about again (Norah's and our own--though, I worry sometimes about Libby's, just because it stinks so bad. Ha! Sorry, Libby, good thing almost nobody reads this blog, eh?). It's been a long, hard road, and one that I wouldn't wish on anyone, but I think we might be through the worst of it.

Of course, now that I've said that, he'll completely forget how to use the toilet in the next week and we'll be back to square one.

As for Norah . . . well, she's setting women's rights back centuries as far as I'm concerned. I know, I know. Getting a girl was MY decision, and I have to take responsibility for it (and, of course, we love her too much to ever wish that we'd decided otherwise--but she's not making that an easy decision. She's just lucky that she's adorable, that's all I'm saying).

The problem was, I'm sure, that I didn't grow up with any girls--there was just us three boys in the house besides Mom, and, you know, Mom's don't count as females. I had no proper frame of reference. All I had was what I'd heard and my own experiences with girls growing up.

Really, besides two male friends (one of whom became my best friend in grade school and I've kept close ties with ever since, and the other I hung out with in high school but lost touch with once I went to college), most of my friends were girls until I got into college and met the group of guys that I still hang out with whenever possible to this day. Possibly this was due to limited selection, or maybe there was some subtle "if I'm friends with the cute girls then I'll be there to swoop in when they're boyfriends dump them" (note to any high school guy that ever reads this--don't bother with this concept, it never works, all you'll ever get is loads of baggage to help them carry and not a lot else) thing going on. Or maybe I just related better to girls most of the time (I do have a taste for "chick rock" and was a fan of Sarah McLachlan several years before Lilith Fair and the "womyn" decided to claim them as their own).

So there was that. And I had also heard that girls usually bond better with their fathers than their mothers, at least early on, and figured that would be ideal since I was going to be the one at home with them. So there was that, too.

But, let me tell you, whatever you've heard about girls bonding more with their dad's is highly exaggerated, or, more likely, was coming from a family where the dad wasn't the one staying at home with the kids. Butts doesn't really want to have much to do with me if Libby is around as an option. She'll grudgingly accept me as her only option during the day, but the minute Libby walks in the door, Norah has her arms up in the air and to be picked up and won't give me the time of day again until Libby's off to work the next morning.

Anyway, on to the relevant stuff from this weekend. In addition to Gabe being sick, Norah has been miserable as well. It didn't start with her until Saturday afternoon, but it's been a rampant onslaught of god awful moods ever since then. She might have the same stomach stuff Gabe has, but she is also getting in her eye teeth. Personally, I think it's just been the teeth these past few days, so she'll probably start with the stomach stuff also tonight or tomorrow and be twice as bad.

God I hope not.

As I'm sure I don't need to remind anyone, but Norah is a drama queen. Actually, as far as my frame of reference goes, she is the Queen of Drama. And, even though I don't need to remind anyone, I'm going to, with a video.

This was just a minute of what we've been dealing with for the past forty-eight hours or so, more or less every minute she's awake and not utterly distracted by something. She's refused to sleep for more than thirty minutes at a time--with one or two hour breaks in between--and because she's so tired and hungry since she won't sleep and refuses to eat, she won't be consoled by anything.

Gabe (who's a boy, in case anyone has forgotten), meanwhile, has been an ideal patient. He's decided that it's best if he just lies quietly on the couch and watches Monsters Inc. for the fifteenth time in the last week.

I blame all of this on her being a girl.

Unfortunately, even though I know that's a broad generalization and probably entirely unfair, I can't be any more specific because she's awake again and screaming her little girl lungs out. Maybe next time.