Project Managing the McCluskys

Turns out that my past life as a project manager has served me well for parenting. At least in terms of the schedule management. Or so I thought.

So in 11 weeks or so New Baby arrives. Got that down as a milestone. There are a few dependencies associated with that, such moving Kate’s room into what’s now the office to free up the crib for the young’un. And to do that we need to move the office downstairs into this weird little basement room, which means that Mark needs to move all his bike stuff from the weird basement room (multiple bikes, a bureau of cycling clothes, cases of Gatorade, bike tools, helmets, shoes, and a gazillion water bottles) along with tents, beach towels, and sleeping bags, into the the garage.

Mark has already started the bike stuff migration, but the office is still very much intact, and very much teeming with bookcases, books, computers, file cabinets and a bunch of musical equipment.

Every project manager worth their MS Project Plan knows that it sometimes takes completion of one task to spur on the onset of another one. And as it happens I got a flyer in the mail announcing that a huge kid-stuff store is having a furniture warehouse sale tomorrow. So Kate and I are going big girl bed shopping. A field trip which, if fruitful, will result in more urgency around the need to make way in the office for Kate’s new swingin’ big girl boudoir.

And, of course, in my manic state of nesting, I can’t wait to obsess over what all I’ll need to get and do to make Kate’s new room appealing for her, but moreover cute as the Dickens in my own eyes. The potential for endless runs to Ikea and Target to meet this objective makes me giddy with delight. This because I have already overhauled and or re-organized almost every other room in the past two months due to Crazy Lady Nesting, and it seems silly to do them all over again. I need a new outlet for this beyond-my-ability-to-control animalistic phase.

Back on my gantt chart of What Needs Happenin’ Before Bay Comes, is the issue of Kate and preschool. At one point a few months ago, in the productive early morning hours of prenatal insomnia I realized with intense clarity that what I’d need more than anything was for Kate to have a place to go (a nanny share or preschool) 2-3 mornings a week when I was tending to the new baby.

And driven Mama that I am, I somehow took that middle-of-the-night self-assigned action item and made good on it. So now Kate is in preschool. And since no sudden moves can descend on the project plan of family dynamics, we were lucky enough to get her started with plenty of time to acclimate before her little sibling started sucking parental attention away from her like a vacuum cleaner.

And initially it seemed Kate was going to oblige us neatly with little to no transitional issues or new school trauma. But then the “outside time” at the school started to overwhelm her. The kids from her classroom and a couple others pour into the school’s playground all at once and the mayhem and unstructured time seems to throw our Little Miss for a loop.

Give her noodles to glue to a paper plate and she’s fine. But in the wilds of the outdoors she’s been coming undone.

One of the teachers has told us when Kate starts bumming out outside, she takes her in and they hang out and play in the classroom. And at the end of the day when you ask Kate about playing outside, she cheerily reports, “I cry outside,” as if she’s telling you, “We had muffins at snack time.”

Hearing about this has been heart wrenching for Mark. But, especially with the unemotional way she reports this to us, I wasn’t too concerned. By all other reports Kate seems to find preschool pretty groovy. And to be honest, it seemed to me that it wasn’t in the plan for Mark to get waylaid by this little development. It will work out! We will move on! I will buy new curtains for the basement office room and everything will be okay. See how well we are moving through our tasks?

Today the nanny is on vacation. (Selfish.) So I blasted out of the office at noon, feeling a certain amount of work-neglect guilt, to fetch Kate from school. Surprisingly for the time of day I got enmeshed in traffic and drive 15MPH for a solid 30 minutes. I realized I’d be late to get Kate. All the kids who spend the full day there would be lying down for their naps. Then the gas tank went from kinda low to the red light going on. I decided the traffic hold-up left me no time to get gas, but the longer I sat in traffic the lower the indicator needle moved to the bottom of the last white line. (It’s never a good sign when you find yourself rationalizing about where on that last line of tank emptiness you are.) Add to this my desperate need to pee.

Suffice it to say I wasn’t feeling at one with the universe when I skidded into Kate’s classroom 10 minutes late, and then saw she had a big scrape on her nose and a bloody upper lip. When I asked the teacher who was with her what happened it seemed like she was on a slow record speed responding to me. I mean, I think she just said hello to me or something before starting to tell me, but I was already in Crazy Mode and just wanted to know right away what the $^%(# happened to Kate?

The fact is, Kate was fine. Yes, she’d fallen off a log, and sure she cried for a while afterwards, but she was over it. But for me, I felt a disturbing inner lurch as I went from feeling great about our latest foray into preschool into a mode of “wait, this might not all be perfect and settled in my mind after all.” There are some things that I’m going to need to get used to here.

I’d heard that after a couple good weeks an otherwise “adjusted” preschooler may backslide into some transitional issues. But no one prepared me for the fact that that could happen to me as well.

When Kate registered my presence, she started to wimper and demanded a kiss on her owie. And the teacher, after finally sputtering out what happened, decided to launch into details of how she comforted Kate and then what they did, and this is how she was the rest of the day which was really very happy and doing well for the most part blah blah blah, which I suddenly had no interest in hearing about. I just wanted to get Kate and get out of there. (And I wanted to pee.) The thought of Kate having had a bad experience outside, which was already the Bad Place for her, just seemed unbearable. We needed to go home home home.

I struggled down the sidewalk holding the car seat Mark left me when he dropped Kate off against my big belly, and trying not to drop my keys or Kate’s sweater and extra pair of pants. Ten paces behind me Kate dawdled along, dangling her lunch box and looking like a pathetic waif with her barrettes sagging in her hair and her face scraped up and bloody. It seemed like miles to the car and worlds away from our dear sweet home, as Kate announced she wanted to walk on the “crunchy leaves” and slowed down even further. It was all I could do to not sit down on the sidewalk and bawl.

In any given project there is always the unexpected unplanned for snafu that jumps out at you, invariably when you’re also having a bad hair day. And no matter how much of a bad-ass you are, you can’t always rally on the spot and regain your firm grasp. For some project managers the lack of control is probably a fairly familiar feeling, but for others, knowing it could have been avoided devours us.

In all my transitional strategizing and well-laid plans to ensure everyone moved through all there is to do before the new baby arrives, I totally overlooked the potential for me to put a kink in the plans. Without expecting it, and certainly without wanting it, it became apparent that it was going to take me a little longer to adjust to preschool than I’d planned for. It’s not that I suddenly felt like it wasn’t a safe place for Kate to be, or that I even really had any misgivings about the place. It was just its utter newness.

Finally at the car, I heaved the car seat in and was preparing forlornly to climb in with my big belly and crouch over it to install it. My internal dialog was chanting “Home, home, home.” When I looked out at Kate to make sure she was staying safely by the car, she peered up at me and said “I don’t want to go, Mama. I want to stay preschool!”

Toddler Fashion Commentary

Last night Mark put on his red long-sleeved AIDS Ride t-shirt when he came home from work.

Kate: “What that say, Dada?”

Mark: “Ride to end AIDS.”

Kate: “I love it! That is so cute!”

Keep an Eye on Your Snakes

When I was pregnant with Kate I had the usual spate of irresponsibility nightmares. You know, the garden variety leave-the-store-and-forget-the-baby-in-the-shopping-cart type nightmares. Or the, “Where’s your new baby?” question that the kindly neighbor asks and you think, “Oh shit! That’s right! Where is she?” I also had one in which the baby was very small and I kept her in a Tupperware (before you judge me, I didn’t put the top on it–duh), and then I realized I forgot to give her water for a while–not something one generally gives an infant, but in my Dream Land it was appropriate. Oops!

Last night I woke Mark up in the middle of the night. “The snakes!” I implored him. “I forgot about them and they are loose!”

The situation being, that I was caring for two very large white snakes and realized that I was forgetful about ensuring they would stay in their bag or crate or whatever. I’d woken up from my dream, but was still certain that those snakes needed corralling before God knows what happened. (Sure, these snakes aren’t a baby, per se, but the lack of tending to them made me feel they ranked with the hapless mother dreams.)

Mark didn’t seem to care so much about this dire scenario. In fact, I’d categorize his reaction to the news as more annoyed than anything. “What?! I was asleep! It’s 1:45!”

Weird. If someone told me there were some huge loose snakes lurking around I’d hardly be feeling sleepy.

Anyway, ten minutes later after I assume we both dozed off, I woke up once more feeling an even more hellbent on imparting to Mark the extent of the danger I’d put us were in. I’d been irresponsible with these snakes–which it seemed were somehow the property of work, kinda like when you could sign up to take the classroom hamster home over a holiday–but with Mark’s help I figured we could get out of this pickle.

“Mark!” I called out to his side of the bed again. “The Sunset snakes! They are loose. I let them loose!” Again, Mark expressed apparent disinterest, and an even more ardent desire to sleep sans my reptilian jibber-jabber than he did when I first woke him up.

This morning after his alarm went off Mark informed me that I was talking in my sleep to him about snakes. “Oh, I was totally awake,” I assured him. Sure, it all started out with a dream, but when I woke up, the urgency I felt to get him to intercept the consequences of my irresponsibility was very real.

And he really didn’t seem to care much. Maybe I should scream out “Fire!” in the middle of his REM cycle tonight, just to see how he reacts.

Anyway, in the breaking light of day we laughed for a good ten minutes about it. But I still looked around good and hard before reaching into my closet for my shoes.

When I got to work I saw a woman whose family lives in San Diego, and realized where this whole snake thing hailed. She’d just told me that her parents are back in their house after the wildfire evacuation, but they have 6 inches of ash in their pool and throughout their yard. If that’s not bad enough, there are rattle snakes that have come down from the mountains (biblical, no?) that are lurking under the ash, so they’ve got to be vewy vewy careful when they walk anywhere outside.

Um, iiiiick!!!! A perfectly good plot line to inform my night’s dreams, no?

On NPR I just heard a sleep expert saying that pregnant women report having lots of weird dreams. It might be hormonal, the guy said, or it might just be because you’re sleeping less soundly and remember more of your dreams from waking up a lot. In which case you are always having freaky dreams, but just don’t remember them.

I think I’m just doing my part to ensure that my sleep–and God knows, Mark’s–takes on the restless and unpredictable pattern that having a newborn in your house presents. Just trying to ease the transition. And reinforce in Mark that as the man of the house, he has a responsibility to protect us women and children from whatever evils, real or imagined, dare to disrupt us.

Kate Becomes a Duckling

Kate started preschool on Tuesday. As a 2-year-old, she’s considered a Duckling, and in future years will be a Gosling, a Mallard, etc. It’s a classroom naming metaphor my mother–the self-appointed patron saint of ducks–would no doubt embrace.

Carrying her lunch box and decked in her new school clothes–a tan corduroy jumper, orange quilted vest, leggings and white sneaks–she could have been me going off to what what was then called nursery school, circa 1970. Of course, she wasn’t proudly toting her new Trapper Keeper. Then again, I didn’t have one until I was a bit older too. (But who can think about back-to-school without thoughts of Trapper Keepers dancing in your head?)

Since Kate’s filling a mysterious and miraculous last-minute opening in a highly-demanded preschool, she’s joining the school year midstream. All the other kids have already played out their adjustment issues. And now they’re clued into what to do at circle time, know the words to a handful of songs, and have likely already exchanged some germs, bites, and good times.

From the parental perspective, the spate of stories about parents who had to peel their kids off them to leave, or whose kids nonchalantly waved them off but the mother still bawled in her car in the parking lot over the fact that “little Jordan is such a big boy now”–all those stories have waned by now too.

I couldn’t help but wonder how Kate and I would play out this milestone duet.

After a constant stream of “preschool this/preschool that” banter in the drive over, once inside Kate held my hand with eyes wide open and mouth clamped shut. But after a tour of her cubbie hole and the sign-in sheet, a teacher easily lured Kate over to a table to decorate a mini-pumpkin with one part glitter and three parts paste. With a quick smooch I was outta there with no drama in sight.

As I fumbled through the labyrinth of classrooms to find a door out I passed by a window into the room where Kate was showing the craft gods who was boss. For a second I wondered if this would be my emotional moment–looking in on her blond pigtailed cuteness when she was oblivious to my presence.

Nope. No tears, no “there’s my little girl gettin’ so big heartache.” I’d figured she would groove on the preschool scene, and I was right. Teacher Lilia even gushed to me when I picked up Kate four hours later that she’d never seen a toddler transition so well on their first day–something she tells all parents?

Oh Miss Kate you continue to amaze and impress us. Muttering the alphabet–all the letters, and in all the right places!–while I give you a bath. Commending me after I pee with a “Good job, Mama!” Telling me about your new school friend, Ben, who you’ve likely already hug-tackled with your unbridled toddler glee.

Before we know it you’ll be questioning our politics, despairing our technical ineptitude and no longer volunteering information on Ben, or Henry, or whoever it is who has captured your attention.

Even though I made it through your first day of preschool, I still have plenty of parking lot crying in me for other times in your life. So prepare to be embarrassed.

26 Weeks? Is That All?

For the love of God this pregnancy may stretch out for all eternity!

I mean, mostly I feel like the holidays will be here before I know it, then the baby will be due. But that’s only if I can get out of this Twilight Zone which seems to be the tail end of the 20-something weeks.

At yoga yesterday during show-and-tell time, once again all the other mothers-to-be were able to show off their ability to retain how far along they are. (Show offs.) And when it was my turn I just decided to ‘fess up. “Um, I’m not really sure how many weeks I am,” I said weakly. “Maybe, um . . . 28?”

In the tub last night I decided to flip through some of my old pregnancy books. You know, nurture an interest in this developing child in order to maybe foster more healthy fetal development. You know, try to muster up the fascination that I had with the whole process when I was pregnant with Kate. You know, fake it.

But it’s like the “Your Pregnancy Week by Week” book was written just to mock us second-timers who have no sense of what week we’re in. I just skimmed the 27 to 29 week range and figured I had it covered. I read about some of the horrific things that can happen from “What to Freak Out About When You’re Expecting” and thought to myself that I should remember to tell Mark the crown to rump length of the baby at this point, so I could alleviate any guilt he might have about not reading anything this time around either.

Finally this evening I remembered to go BabyCenter.com to learn how far along I really am. What I don’t know, The Internets will tell me! Thank God.

Well, it turns out that after using their handy dandy pregnancy calculator thingy I discovered I’M ONLY AT 26 WEEKS. This seems utterly impossible. Wasn’t I 26 weeks along about a month ago at my last midwife appointment? Did I slip into some reverse coma where instead of losing the last few weeks, I feel like I’ve experienced them but time has really stood still?

For all I know I could get a BabyCenter email newsletter next week telling me that I’m at 21 weeks. I mean, at this point I really wouldn’t be surprised.

Well, given that I am where they tell me I am, what I learned is that the nerve pathways in the baby’s ears are developing now. And that if it’s a boy–which I’ve been feeling lately like it is–his testicles are starting their epic descent into his scrotum. It’s “a trip that will take about two to three days.” You know, a nice weekend-length itinerary.

Learning a tidbit like that helped me to realize what I’m missing out on by not closely monitoring each stage of this baby’s development. Or maybe what I’m not missing out on.

This time around, looking down at my belly every once and a while and commenting to Mark, “Yep, I’m getting bigger alright” might just be all I need to do.

Keepin’ it Real for the Kids

Kate is a busy mother. And it’s no wonder. She has on the order of 6 babies. All who need her vigilant attention.

Of course, there’s the diaper changing. Which involves finding her own diaper bag, ferreting out a diaper or two and the package of wipes. Then, no less than 20 wipes need to be extricated from the box. You can find fault with the girl’s diapering prowess, but I’ll say this: She’s a thorough butt-wiper.

And she works lovingly. She hardly slaps that baby down on the changing pad–did I forget to mention she gets that out too? No, she loving holds the baby’s head as she lowers it down to the floor, while quietly commanding, “Now lie down.”

When not dealing with what’s coming out (in her imagination at least), Kate busies herself with the input. Snapping the straps on the booster seat has long been an entertaining pastime, since the time when we bought a small booster seat for her to use at Grandpa’s house. When her high chair became too cumbersome and babyish for Kate, we got our own booster seat and it wasn’t long before she realized that it was perfectly suitable for her own babies mealtimes. Invariably when you go to put Kate in it, it’s already occupied.

Sure, she gets them seated. But the actual feeding comes in fits and starts, truth be told. At times they get a sip from her own sippy cup. And more recently they get a drink of “owange juice” from a bottle that came with a doll she got for her birthday. Not sure why they sell toy baby bottles that appear to be filled with Tang, though I’m probably too hardcore about rarely giving Kate anything more than water or milk. But like all of us, you want for your children what you didn’t (or don’t) have, right? So, for Kate’s babies, owange juice it is.

There’s also much time spent putting the babies “night-night” in either her crib (which requires them to be flung over the side railing, hopefully landing comfortably on the mattress) or arranged carefully in their doll cradle. This involves lots of smoothing down of their blankets, kisses on their heads, and the repeated incantation, “Babies go night-night. Babies go night-night.”

The hairdressing takes a good deal of time too: putting barrettes on and off, struggling with pony tail holders, and attempting to brush or comb even the hairless babies’ heads.

Yesterday I was cooking dinner for friends who recently had a baby. With all the cooking Mark does for us it’s a wonder I even remember where the stove is. Thankfully I get practice whenever a friend has a baby and I whip up some easy-to-freeze one-dish meal.

Kate’s got this new step stool that I bought her for a buck at a garage sale. Best money I ever spent. She’s got the fancy stool Grandpa made her stationed at the bathroom sink, but this crappy plywood one is her vehicle for checking out everything that’s going down in the kitchen. And she slings that thing around with a flick of her wrist like a spry oldster with their walker. It’s funny, but can be annoying when she’s tracking your every move one second behind you. You’re at the cutting board and need something from the fridge and before you know it there she is teetering on her tiptoes on the stool’s top step, gravely inspecting whatever it is you’re taking out.

After 20 minutes of her being my little shadow I encouraged her to check in on her dolls. Surely one of them needs a diaper change at this point, no? And sweet relief, she took the bait. But as these things tend to go, after a while it was growing a little too quiet in the living room, requiring me to investigate.

What I saw was no less than seven of her shirts and several pair of pants spread out on the carpet near her soon-not-to-be-naked babies. And with serious determination she was heading back to her bedroom to purloin more. I was onto her and followed her into her room.

As she’s leaning into her dresser drawer to scoop up another armload of clothes she looked at me and stopped. She extracted herself and turned towards me with her arms straight out like a traffic cop. “No come in my room, Mama! No come in my room!”

My God, I thought. Isn’t the whole “do not enter” culture supposed to emerge years from now? Have I got a toddler or a teen here?

At any rate, I didn’t take it too much to heart. Sure she was making a terrific mess, and dragging perfectly clean (and anal-retentively folded) clothes throughout the house. But I know as well as the next mother, you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do for your babies. And ain’t nobody going to get in your way.

Boy Crazy 101

In what must count as a small miracle, we were offered a space for Kate in what seems to be a great preschool. This presented itself when I called them to get on their waiting list for next September, and meekly asked if by any chance they might have any openings in January. After the woman suppressed pitying laughter, she took my name down in the event that “a family moves–which does happen sometimes.”

Then a couple weeks later she leaves me a message that a space has opened up.

Did I mention it’s also just a 3.5 minute drive from our house? Though, who’s counting.

We’ve worked out a deal with the nanny so she’s not docked for the hours Kate’s at school, and until I’m on maternity leave she’ll pick Kate up. A deal our hard-driving dealmaker of a nanny actually went for!

All this certainly adds up to such a great bestowal of luck and karma, that Mark and I really shouldn’t be allowed to ask for birthday or Christmas presents for at least a year or so.

The hope is that going off to school a couple mornings a week will be a good thing for Kate when the new baby comes. She’ll be able to roll with some kids her own age and not be trapped in the house in the middle of rainy season with a bleary-eyed mother and squalling new sibling. Plus, having only one wee one to mind will make it easier for me to do glamorous things like shop for groceries and take weekly showers.

Kate always has a lot to talk about, but the impending adventures in preschool provide lots of fresh new fodder.

Tonight as she ate dinner, we delved into the virtues of preschool.

Me: “This week we are going to visit the preschool.”

Kate: “Mama come?”

Me: “Yes, Kate and Mama will go and see the preschool.”

Kate: “Preschool have little swings?”

Me: “I know there is a playground, but I don’t remember if there are swings.”

Kate: “Preschool have sand?”

Me: “Yes, there is a sandbox, and a garden, and lots of toys.”

Kate: “Oh.”

Me: “And there are lots of boys and girls for you to be friends with. And Owen will be there. He goes to the same preschool.”

Kate: [face lights up and she tries to stand up while strapped into her booster seat] “I HUG BOYS!”

Me: “You want to hug boys at preschool?”

Kate: “YES! Hug boys! HUG BOYS!”

And later…

Me: “There are also chickens at the preschool, and they are going to get a bunny rabbit.”

Kate: “Bunny rabbit? Bunny rabbit DANCE! Dance, dance, dance!”

This discussion clearly illuminates some of the educational objectives Kate is setting for herself in anticipation of her foray into academia. We’re so proud of her.

I just hope for their sakes those bunny rabbits know how to cut a rug. As for the boys, they’re on their own.

Kate Takes a Stand

Okay, so I know that kids are getting cell phones these days at an age when I was still enthralled by Sesame Street. The timeline for when girls first wear make-up, have their maiden make-out session and even get their period seems to have moved up. But I never dreamed Our Kate would be representative of this modern day turbo-maturing process–or at least that we’d see any signs of it at this point in her life.

But today, walking to the parking lot after a lovely outdoor lunch at Picante, our favorite Mexican restaurant, Kate turned to Mark and proclaimed, “I not eating meat any more, Dada.”

Oh great. Here we go with the “no food with faces” attitude and her turning up her nose when Mark tosses a steak on the grill. Next thing you know she’ll be papering her room with Greenpeace posters and starting a compost worm farm in the backyard.

I mean, in my day one didn’t going through the swearing off of meat products until college. These days I’ve heard about teenagers deciding to go vegetarian. But at age two? I know Kate is advanced and all, but sheesh!

Well it’s what we get for living so close to Berkeley, I guess.

Conversations with Kate

Kate: “Where we going, Mama?”

Me: “To the grocery store.”

Kate: “No grocery store!”

Me: “No grocery store? Why?”

Kate: “Comic book store! We go comic book store!”

Me: “Ah, I see your father has been influencing you.”

Kate: “No grocery store, Mama! Bike shop! Bike shop!”

* * *

Me: “I love you, Kate. Do you love me?”

Kate: “Yes Mama.”

Me: “Do you know what love is, Kate?”

Kate: “Yes.”

Me: “What is love?”

Kate: “Uhhh… Dada!”

* * *

Kate: “Where are you Mama?” [A new perpetual question, often asked when I'm standing right next to her. This time we were walking down the sidewalk.]

Me: “I’m in the sink. Where are you, Kate?”

Kate: “The laundry basket.”

Better than Dog Kisses

Growing up Chez Bruno everyone in the family used the same stupid voice to speak to the dog. We called it, unsurprisingly, “dog talk.” And a common expression in dog talk was to request “kisses on the lips” from the dog.

I’m not proud of this, mind you, but one’s childhood is what is was.

Mark is away on a work trip so it’s Kate and I flying solo for most of the week. Yesterday was crazy hot here–and despite the fan and open window in her room, Kate woke up a couple times early in the evening covered in sweat and calling out for a drink of water in the funny way she does, “Wau-duh? Wau-duh, Mama?”

She’s a pretty damn solid 7-ish to 7-ish sleeper (knock wood), but there have been some intermittent nights over the past couple months where’s she’s had Mark or I (or both of us) up tending to her wau-duh or blanket arranging needs.

So last night when I was in her room twice before 10:30PM, I was fearful that my night of solo parenting had the potential to be a night of sheer hell. Just when I was looking forward to doing snow angels in the bed alone, not having to worry about all my tossing and turning and pregnant-belly pillow-propping keeping Mark awake.

Thankfully she settled in as did I. But at 6:15 when the garbage trucks descended on the ‘hood she was up again. (Can someone please invent the Bosch dishwasher of garbage trucks that emit barely a perceptible swooshing white noise? I can’t help but think I’m not the only early-morning sleeper who would appreciate this.)

Anyway, at 6:15AM, knowing the nanny wasn’t arriving until 8:00 so I couldn’t even get a jump start on my commute if I wanted to, I was just not willing to rise and shine. So I went into Special K’s room, which was still thankfully dark, and informed her of the unacceptable waking hour. And with some careful placement of her loveys and attentive reapplication of blankies I managed to convince her that we both should really sleep some more. (Realizing, in the karmic parenting cycle, that I will no doubt pay for this small miracle down the road.)

With the side of her crib up I couldn’t lean in to kiss her. These days even with it down the preg-o belly tends to get in the way. So bleary eyed I kissed my hand and put it on her forehead before turning to swan dive into my own bed.

That she didn’t go for. “No Mama! Kisses on the lips!” she cried. And that was too much for even my early morning exhaustion to resist. If I had to lower myself via crane to get to her I would have.

Oh Miss Kate, I will happily give you kisses on the lips whenever you want them, silly girl! Kissing you beats getting a wet one from an aging Dachshund named Schultz hands down.