Tonight the little angel and I read books before bed.  One of the books was Once Upon a Potty.  Part of this book discusses the different parts of Prudence's body and what they are called. 

Me:  "Can you point to Prudence's eyes?"

The little angel pointed.

Me:  "Good!  Can you point to Prudence's ears?"

The little angel considers the picture, then decides Prudence's wiry ponytails are her ears.  Good enough.

Me:  "Good!  Can you point to Prudence's hands?"

The little angel nails the hands.

I look at the next page, where Prudence is leaning over, Girls Gone Wild-style, revealing a small circle that is the hole from which her poopy comes out (I know, because it says so in the text).

Me:  "CAn you point to where Prudence expels her fecal matter?"

The little angel laughs.

Me:  "Okay, fine.  Where does Prudence's poopy come out?"

The little angel has not considered this before.  She carefully studies the picture.

Me:  "Do you see a hole where the poopy might come?  Like where we put your diapers?"

The little angel finds the hole.

And I am deeply disturbed by the entire conversation.

Damn, parenting is hard.

My least favorite expression is "See Me."  I hated it when teachers wrote it on my papers.  I hated it when bosses e-mailed it or wrote it on Post-Its stuck to my computer monitor.  I never thought I would have to deal with this most hated expression in the world of the little angel.

Today her teacher in Waddler B wrote it on her sheet.

Apparently the little angel has been "clingy, whiny and wanting to nibble on her cup" during the day. "See me," the note read.  "I need to talk to you face-to-face."

I HATE it when someone says that when there is no even remote possibility I can see them face-to-face in the near future.  I won't even see her face-to-face tomorrow morning, because I can't do drop-off due to an appointment.

I'm sure the recent regression is easily explained by one of two things:  1) my new job and our recent schedule changes (hell, I was nibbling on my cup most of the day, too) and 2) her hatred of the growing midget population of Waddler B.  Oh, Two-Year-Old Room (henceforth to be dubbed Toddler High), you can't come soon enough for the little angel.  She hates those damn babies, yes, she does.  She loves certain babies, such as Baby N. and Arrruuuuun (as she says it, as though she is howling for the moon), but these babies are children of our friends.  They share their toys and gurgle cutely at her.  They don't steal her toys and yell when she's trying to sleep.  Even Ms. S. finally said something to that effect the other day.  We all know that it's time for her to go, Waddler B has jumped the shark, let's move on to the next thing already, WTF.

Yet still.  I'll have to call her teacher, Ms. J., and either come off as a busy working mama who doesn't care if my daughter is, like, totally regressing or an obsessed mother-of-one who doesn't know a phase when it breathes Doritos in her face. I can't win.  Really. 

See me tomorrow. I'll let you know.

Today I happened to see one of the executives administrators at Large Corporate Tax Prep Company where I'm on a three-month contract (I hope) until June.  I haven't seen her since I left exactly one year ago last week. 

Her:  "Oh, my gosh!  How ARE you?  How is the little angel?"

Me:  "She's fine!  She's almost two."  (I'm wondering what the right next question to ask is, since the last time I saw her, she'd just suffered a miscarriage.)  "How are yours?"

Her:  "Oh, he's great.  He's almost four."

(I pause.  So do I ask?  What's the right thing to do?)

Me:  (I'm rude) "How have things been going?"

Her:  "No luck yet.  There's nothing wrong, though.  Just have to keep trying. When are you going to have your next one?"

Me:  (Long pause while I consider why the hell everyone assumes you plan to have multiples if you have one.)  "Never?"

Her:  "WHATTTT?????"  (She could not be more mortified than if I had told her I thought I might just leave the little angel outside for the squirrels.)  "You CAN'T stop with one?"

Me:  "Really?  Why not?"

Her:  (sputtering)  "Because...only children...they just...don't you WANT another one?"

Me:  "Well, no.  That's the thing.  I'm sort of happy with the one that I have."

Her:  "I just don't understand.  It can't work."

Me:  "There are a whole bunch of people who have made it work.  They're called 'China.'"

Her:  "Does your husband want another?"

Me:  (I'm starting to tire of this conversation.)  "He's seventh of eight, and he doesn't want another one."

Her:  "Don't you?"

Me:  "No, not really.  No.  Plus, look, G. - I don't even have a REAL JOB.  How would I afford even more daycare?  My beloved is an entrepreneur.  It's just not in the cards."

Her:  "But maybe later?"

Me:  "Um."  I shrug.  What does she want from me? "You know as well as I do that the brunt of it will be on me.  I've got to want it to do it, G."

This stops her.  She does know.  She does know that despite the father's best intention, it is generally the mother who worries about nutrition labels, knows exactly whom to invite to the birthday parties and why, when to make doctor and dentist appointments and how far in advance to Ebay the playclothes to get the best bargains.  My beloved does not even know what size shoes the little angel wears.  He knows these are all things I keep in my brain, along with a possible menu for dinner tonight, six possible job leads, my syllabus for the entire semester, all his relatives' birthdays and a reminder to buy conditioner that will go on sale next week.  Oh, and I needed to return the book Raising Your Only Child to the library.

Her:  "Well, I would never tell another woman how to live her life."

Me: (shocked silence)

So I took this last comment back with me to my prairie dog hole in the cube farm.  I looked at the editor, who sits across from me. 

Me:  "Do you have kids?"

Editor:  "Um, no."

Me:  "Do people ever ask you why not?"

Editor:  "Um, no.  I might have to kill them."

Me:  "Why does everyone tell me I need to procreate again just because I managed to do it once?"

Editor:  "Really?  That's so rude.  That's like asking someone when they're going to get married."

Me:  "Yeah."

Editor:  "I think you should tell them you can't have another because it would interfere with your drinking."

I think I love her.

This weekend we went back to Iowa to see my parents and my sister.  The little angel was her normal, rambuctuous, precocious self.

On Saturday night, my sister and I were giving the little angel a bath when she admitted the parenting thing looked hard.  She said she wasn't sure she was ready for parenthood after watching Elmo twice in one day.  I laughed and said nobody is ready for parenting, that I myself often didn't feel like the adult in the room.

In retrospect, that's a lie.

The thing is that once you give birth, your eyes are no longer your own, at least not when the little angel is in the room.

We went to the Henry Doorley Zoo, which is an awesome zoo.  It's in Omaha, which is not a particularly glamorous city, but the zoo has always been its claim to fame.  The aquarium there, I would have to say, rivals at least the Shedd in Chicago.  We've visited both in the past year, and watching sharks swim over your head in the tunnel at the HD is an awesome and powerful experience.  But even when the shark was directly above me, so close that I could've counted the intertwining rows of teeth, I couldn't even stop to fathom its nearness for needing to know at all times exactly where the little angel was.  My eyes are not my own anymore.

My eyes need to see her when she is with me, at least now, when she is so young and needs me to watch over her.  I wish they were my own, the way I wish I could've seen The Sopranos tonight at its regularly scheduled time. It is my favorite show - well, it rivals Grey's Anatomy - and though it may seem silly to rate a television show up with my daughter's bedtime, it does.  But of course, the little angel wins. She wins because she is made up of my skin, just as Amy so aptly put it.  I can't think straight when she's crying, even though I know a toddler should have the right to cry, just as a baby does.

It was easier to let her cry when she was a baby, because then I always figured she didn't really know what was going on.  Now that she does, now that she cries for me, and me specifically, it is like someone has shut down my neorological functioning when she is crying for me. Oh, sure, I try to ignore it, don't want to spoil her and all that. I do want her to become independent and function by herself in this strange world, but there is a part of me still that wants to gather her up in my arms at all times as she is young, knowing that someday she will cry for a boy, or a girl, or someone other than me when she is sick, or sad, or scared. 

There will come a day when I have to take back my eyes, for both of our sakes.

It's just not now.  For now, the sharks are literal, and I can still shield her from most of them, and I should.

Because I am the adult in the room.

Last night I got home from dinner with friends just in time to put the little angel to bed.  Well...she was already in bed, but I kicked my XM-radio-listening husband out of her room and sat down next to her.  She was so excited that I was home that it then took a while to get her calmed back down, so I picked her up and went to the rocking chair for a while. 

As we were rocking, her little hand snuck back around my waist and started playing with the edge of my sweater, which had fringe on it.  I felt her touch on the skin of my back.  It felt like nothing else.  The touch of a child's hand on the mother has an authority over almost any other touch.  When do we lose that confidence about our right to lovingly touch our mothers and fathers?  What adult would simply reach up under their mother's sweater to pat her lower back?  But children do - at least small children, toddlers, babies.  They will stick their fingers up our noses, but they also bury their faces in our necks with such certainty it inspires us mothers to prepare to run through fire to protect them, to justify their belief that we can prevent all harm.

I still hug my mother, as often as she wants me to, but I can't remember the last time I stuck my nose in her neck or lay down next to her on the couch.  Somewhere around tweendom, we pull back from touching - our fingers grow tentative.  Mothers begin to ask permission to hug or touch their children's hair.  Children, in their growing independence, have no idea how great a loss their hugs really are until they, too, become mothers holding their toddlers in a rocking chair and wondering how long it will be before those little fingers no longer reach out with such authority.

Tonight the little angel accidentally achieved her first potty success.  Inadvertant pissing, you might call it.  A party foul, if you're drunk, but a highlight of the toddler's pottying career.

The little angel will bail from Waddler B and enter the two-year-old room at the Emerald City next month.  We're very relieved, because Waddler B has become divided along party lines between the little angel's camp and Baby M's camp.  Sworn enemies, they are, and the babies in Baby M's camp are outnumbering the little angel's posse more with each day.  Her best friend S., a scant month younger than she, is her remaining ally.  Baby M., of course, is now refusing to recognize her government.  Daycare can be so political.

Tonight she was sitting on her potty chair as I read her the book with bagels as shapes.  She kept standing up, so I thought she wanted to take off her diaper.  I took it off and started drawing her bath.  She stood up and walked over to the bathtub rim right as I turned the water on.  Like clockwork, she started to pee as the water left the faucet.  Just as the stream hit the ugly linoleum, I grabbed her and put her on the potty chair.  Approximately two drops fell in as she shut down faster than Saddam's trial did when he started making that whole "fuck the USA" speech today.

I started cheering for the two drips.  "Yeah!" sayeth I, proclaiming the drips from the mountaintop of our oddly gray toilet (it matches the gray bathtub - where the previous owners shopped for fixtures, I'll never know).  "You put your pee in the potty!  Huzzah!"  The little angel looked shocked.

I pulled the potty stickers from their hiding place, where they have lain in waiting since she was eighteen months old.  "You get your first potty sticker!"

Potty stickers?  Her little face registered.  There are stickers for everything!  What a wonderful world it is.

I placed the potty sticker on the potty itself.  I got this idea from football teams.  Sometimes they cover the helmets with stickers, and I have no idea why they do this.  I suppose maybe they got it from the military.  Or perhaps it ALL started with potty training. How very Freudian. I could go on with this analogy for a while, but I'm sleepy.

So anyway, that was really the end of it, though I'm hoping she'll try again. Benevolent Pediatrician predicted she would actually be potty-trained by her two-year appointment, though I scoffed at the time and still scoff today. Although, stranger things have happened.  Who knows what motivates mice and men?

Okay, I've been a little busy.  Last Friday, we took off for Iowa City to have a reunion with four of my five college roommates (this time no one was afraid to get on a plane, but my friend N. waited until three days before she needed to leave to try to use a 14-day-advanced-booking free ticket), their husbands (well, one of their husbands, the other one found out the day they were supposed to leave that he had to proctor an exam on Saturday) and their children (all children, including the one in utero, were present and accounted for).  It was LOVELY.  The children played together nicely with each other and Mona the dog.  The adults got to drink lots of wine and watch basketball (well, my beloved did, anyway), and we were able to invoke much unsolicited birth-control on my childless friend by taking her shopping with two under two during dinner time at a hot and crowded mall with a carousel.  Wheee!

On Sunday, it was sleeting in Iowa City. Very cold and icy.  We headed out early, only to find ourselves back in Kansas City at two surrounded by lovely blue sky and 65 degree temperatures.  It was so great outside, in fact, that we stopped at Loose Park with our fully-loaded Ridiculously Large Vehicle and decided to play and visit the ducks. 

As we walked from the playground to the little pond where the ducks were, we encountered young H., the older sister of one of the little angel's former daycare posse.  I have always dreamed that the little angel might aspire to H.'s bright, sunny personality and precociousness.  Every time she sees us, she scampers over, gives the little angel a hug and stops to talk.  She is polite and adorable.  I have always thought she might just be the perfect child. 

This time, we saw H. inadvertently as we inspected the "house" she and her little friend had made under some bushes by the rose garden.  The bushes were of the Japanese-looking type, with a lot of crawl space underneath.  H. asked if she could give the little angel a tour and led her deep into the thicket.  We heard her explaining the house.

H:  "This is the master bedroom, and here's the sink.  This towel is the couch.  See?  You can sit on it and lean back."

(The little angel looks on adoringly.)

My beloved and I exchanged smug glances.  What a little doll H. is!  How nice of her to give the little angel a tour!  Maybe the little angel will be JUST LIKE HER!

H:  "Here's the second bedroom, and there's the back door.  Here's the kitchen, and this is the stove." (Points to a pile of sticks.)

I prepare to walk away, leaving my beloved to collect the little angel. 

H:  "We looked all over the place for matches, but we couldn't find any.  We're still looking, so we can use the stove."

I glance back in horror.  H. catches my eye. 

Me:  (stammering) "I don't think that would be such a good idea."

H:  "Yeah, we don't even have insurance on the house."

Last night after work, my beloved and I took the little angel on a rousing trip to the UPS Store in order to finally, FINALLY get the wills we had drawn up in April 2005 notarized.  I think subconsciously we'd been putting it off, thinking we couldn't possibly die before the wills got signed by someone who would charge us almost $5 a signature.

Fortunately, the man cut us a deal, because there were SIXTEEN signatures required in order for us to leave everything to each other or the little angel.  There were also some other forms in there, forms about which I had forgotten.

Me:  "So, do you realize I'm signing over to you the right to pull the plug on me?"

Notary: (shocked inhalation)

Beloved:  "Yeah.  Will that require power tools?"

Yesterday Cagey talked about co-sleeping and how she felt about it.  She dedicated her post to me, since I complain loudly to complete strangers about how I never get any sleep.  Or at least to my friends, anyway.  I have, over the past year, asked some of the Internet goddesses their opinions on sleep. One told me that she had worked with her famous toddler, who has slept great since four months despite having some other challenges that she has now overcome.  One told me she solved the problem with a family secret, but I can't tell you what it was, because, well, it was a secret.  One told me all three of her kids have ended up in bed with them at some point, and well, she just didn't stress over it. Some just said, "Hey, I feel for you.  This, too, shall pass."

It started me thinking about sleeping in general.  Last night, for instance, I got a lot of sleep.  The little angel made it through until 4:30, then we got some milk and went down on the couch.  She fell back asleep by five and we slept until seven.  It was blissful.  Her little head (well, it's getting heavier all the time, particularly when she's full-on passed out, but still) fits on my right shoulder, and I can turn on my side and breathe in her toddler-hair smell while I doze.  My arm goes around her waist, and she snuggles in like a kitten.  Sometimes, like last night, Sybil will crawl up on the couch and sit above my arm with her tail draped over my elbow.  She twitches her tail like that, and it sometimes occurs to me that this sensation is like touching the underbelly of a dolphin - something you think you should probably not be privy to, but are so astonished and happy that you are.  The feeling of the underside of a tail wrapping around your wrist is akin to stepping through a wardrobe into snow. 

Before the little angel came along, I thought of sleep as a reward, as a necessity I could not live without.  When I was 21, I graduated college a semester early and started working as an advertising account executive a town over.  My four roommates were still hard-partying college seniors who regularly held after-hours parties in our apartment, sometimes until four in the morning. I typically got up at six for work, and it was the kind of place you had to wear pantyhose at.  It was a hellish experience - I was always tired and hated my job, but most of all, I hated the lack of sleep.

I'm a baby about sleep. I love sleep. I function so poorly without sleep, I would never make it in the armed forces, on Survivor or back in a four-year institution on the student side.  However, now I view sleep as a commodity.  There is no bad sleep.  There is just sleep, or lack of sleep, and ANY kind of sleep, even the drooling, mouth-open, so-embarrassing-on-the-airplane sleep is far, far better than NO SLEEP AT ALL.

And the kind of sleep accompanied by a snoring husband (thank you, Lord, for making those squishy yellow earplugs) or a sweating toddler is especially wonderful.  It means you're not in the house or the world alone.  And that is a lovely thing.

So Cagey, sleep with Arun.