Fashion Victims

How'd you like to start your morning having tighty whities thrown in your face?

I was helping Julian get dressed and was pulling a rather stretched out pair of cotton undies over his little beanstalk legs. Yes, the undies are a bit droopy. Yes, they had seen better days when they belonged to Julian's older brother. (Unfortunately for Julian, we hand everything down.)

Julian had ignored the indignity for a long time, but today he was getting wise. He flaps the waist of them against his pooch of a belly and then decides it's time to assert himself. He pulls them down and lets me have it.

"I don't want these calzoncillos!" he shouts with total Spanglish fluency, flinging the undies at me.

OK, OK, don't get your panties in a twist I'm thinking, literally. "Julian, why don't you pick out the underwear you want then."

He stomps over to the dresser in a huff. "I WILL pick my own calzoncillos. I WILL pick them." Stomp. Stomp. Stomp. He rips a pair of Spiderman bikinis out of the drawer. Fine with me. The kids in his daycare have all spent the year potty training together and they enjoy showing each other their underwear. Julian especially likes showing off Spidey. This is one of the many things I pretend I haven't noticed is going on.

I finish with Julian and then turn to help Ian, who's lying on the floor with a heap of clothes next to him that I picked out. Ian is more of a problem. My husband and I call him "Jean Paul", as in "Gaultier", because he tends to be a little on the fussy side about clothes.

"I don't want that shirt," he whines. That shirt has buttons. I should have known better. Ian does not wear any shirt with buttons.

"I don't like those jeans," he says, picking them up by two fingers as if they were radioactive waste. "I want to wear my soccer pants." The soccer pants are elastic-waisted sweats, the kind of thing housebound people wear when they've given up on being even close to presentable. I let him play sports in them but won't go any further. It's almost a daily battle.

What feels like a week later, we're walking out the door. Julian is excited about his Spidey underwear. He's also wearing a t-shirt from the "Blue Angels" that the daycare teachers must think is the only shirt he owns. He doesn't wear anything else. Ian is in tears because I vetoed the soccer pants, but through his tears he's not too distraught to cast a critical eye at me.

"Mom? I don't like that shirt."

I inspect myself. "Why?"

"Because it has buttons."

"Well, I tell you what. They're my buttons and I'll wear them if I want to."

Take that, Jean Paul.

Two Tongues Are Better Than One

I'm trying to get a spoonful of Post cereal into Julian. I aim and keep missing. He's decided he wants to be spoon fed like an infant and on most mornings, although I know I'm just perpetuating the problem, I play along so he doesn't go hungry. Ian's keeping a close watch on the whole operation.

"Mom, it's so funny when you have two tongues," Ian says.

I look closer at my target. No, one tongue. I ask what feels like an obvious question.

"Ian, that's silly. When do you have two tongues?" I ask this to him without looking, concentrating on my objective of getting food into Julian.

When Ian doesn't answer, I look up. His eyes have bugged out, he's screwed up his mouth and he still has bedhead hair. His look says: DUH. "When you're an alien."

Duh. When else?

Forever Young? Not So Much.

"Mom? Ya know what?" Julian says, chomping on a piece of waffle, his head swivelling as he shoots spacey looks all over the room. Then he forgets for a second that he already got my attention.

"Mom? Ya know what?" I'm nodding. "Mom?" I'm still nodding.

"Tell me, Julian."

"When I get big and finish being three years old I'm going to be the baby again."

I think about that for a second. Ah, yes. Reset. Don't we wish.

"Julian, it doesn't really work like that." I am about to drop a bomb on him, so I give him a little squeeze across the table. "You're all done being a baby."

He's shocked. I can see what he's thinking. How can that be possible? How can I be done? There were so many things I would do differently. I wouldn't have morphed into the exorcist baby all those times in the grocery store, especially when I was told I couldn't buy Goldfish. I wouldn't have been such a jerk when I got tired and then refused for hours to fall asleep. I wouldn't have hit my brother so much (well, maybe I would have). If I had a chance to go back, I would have done it all... perfectly.

"So what I'm going be after I'm three years old?" he asks me.

"You're going to be four."

His face brightens. "Then five?" I nod. "Then six, like Lucas?" I nod again. "Then seven eight nine TEN!" He's on a roll. He thinks about this progression and then gives me a pained look.

"Mom? Why it takes so long?"

He he. "Don't worry," I say to him, clearing his plate. "It will all be here and gone before you know it."

He doesn't believe me. But none of us ever believed it, did we?

Cranky

"I think I'm going to be cranky all day," Ian says as we walk through the park to school.

I laugh to myself. How often have I gotten out of bad with that determined sentiment?

"Ian, why are you going to be cranky all day?"

"Because Julian hit me and it made me cranky and now I'm going to be cranky all day." He folds his arms in front of his puffed out little pre-schooler chest.

I recently explained to them about what it meant to "be cranky" and I may be sorry about it. Now, they love to be cranky, to say "cranky", to pretend to be cranky, to make each other cranky. It's starting to make me cranky.

"That doesn't sound like a very good day, Ian. Does it? Nobody likes to be around a cranky person."

Ian shrugs his shoulders. So what. "I like to be cranky."

"So it makes you happy to be cranky?"

"Yes."

"Then you can't be cranky, right? How can you be cranky and happy at the same time?"

He walks and doesn't look at me. I can tell he's annoyed by how right I am.

When I got done with work and saw Ian again at home, he was bounding like Tigger in our living room.

"Ian, what happened to being cranky?"

He giggles, kisses me and bounds away. "Being not cranky is much better, Mom!"

Amen. I wish I had that kind of rebound.

Goodfella

I drove Julian to daycare this morning. Very much on my mind was all the fighting that has been going on between Ian and Julian (alas, Easter vaca means lots of together time and they have the bruises and scratches to show for it).

So I say to Julian: "Hey, you know you and Ian have been fighting a lot."

I look in the backseat and he has this face like DeNiro's in Taxi Driver when he says "You talkin' to me?"

"You know, it makes Mama and Papa really sad when you guys fight."

Still the DeNiro face.

"Yeah, it makes us sad. How do you guys feel?"

Now the face has shifted to DeNiro, but in The Untouchables, as Capone. I'm not encouraged.

"Do you guys feel sad?"

Still the Capone face. Julian puts his head back a little, does something that almost looks like winking, and purses his lips. I'm tempted to duck in anticipation of the swinging bat.

"So Julian, do you guys feel sad?"

He looks me straight in the rear view mirror and says: "NOPE."

I drive on, contemplating my 3-year-old's steely lack of compassion. I wondered if Julian and Ian had a deal to keep quiet. Like DeNiro says in Goodfellas: "never rat on your friends, and keep your mouth shut."

If they do, it's gonna be a long time 'til we get to 18.