Enjoy it. It soon turns into ChaChing$$$
 

I think the most amazing thing about your story is that you and B&C discuss Solzhenitsyn in this situation! My hat goes off to you - I guess its a sign of experienced parents - not noobs like us. ;)
 

We don't discuss Saltstein or whomever you are referring to. It must be a sign of being brainiacs.

By child six we tried very hard not to fall for any of it.

The PT: Take off the cruuuuusttt!

Mrs. B: You can eat the crust.

The PT: NOOOOO TAKEITOFFFFFF!!!

Mrs. B: OK starve.
 

The hardest year of my whole life was the year my only son was two and my first daughter was a newborn. And that was after being childless for eleven years, believe me, I WANTED those children. But he was a perpetual motion machine, if I told you everything he did when he was two you would not believe me. Put a can of tuna in the microwave and turned it on (made a hole in the can), turned on the toaster oven, ate my iron pills, ate crayons and play doh and TIDE, took eggs out of the fridge and broke them one by one, tore the pages out of books, pulled a chair over to the closet so he could climb up and get my husband's deoderant from the closet shelf -- where it was kept because he ate deoderant, ran away into traffic, broke my glasses, got the car into neutral and rolled down the driveway, broke a glass clock and cut himself, cut his hand on the sharp edge of an open tuna can, fell out of his crib, plugged in the TV on Shabbos and turned it on, put a sandwich in the VCR, called 911. I am not making any of this up, not one word.

Now he is 17 and I miss those sweet baby days, he was so smart and adorable and he loved me unconditionally. They never love you so uncritically again, after age two.
 

Ms. Katz - so that's what boys are like... Thank heaven for little girls...
 

Og: My oldest is 10. The public schools here leave much to be desired both academically and in terms of values. So I'm well into the cha-ching phase.

Mirty: I'm afraid. I'm very afraid. Having teenagers is something I feel totally unprepared for.

Wanderer: Oh, right. You, the cardiologist, are going to play the illiterate one! OK. Let me explain the Solzhenitsyn connection. b&c and I are reading a collection of essays by Theodore Dalrymple, Our Culture, What's Left of It.

Theodore Dalrymple, by the way, is a fake name used by an incredibly literate conservative British physician who has worked for much of his career caring for Britain's prisoners and indigents. Doctor Bean, by the way, is a fake name used by a much less literate conservative American physician who hopes to work for much of his career caring for America's most affluent. We came to know Dalrymple from his occasional articles in National Review.

The book so far is extraordinary, and in one of his essays he mentions that Solzhenitsyn realized that the battle against evil wasn't a battle against external ideology or societal dysfunction, it was a battle within each of us, and he mentioned the quote "the line between good and evil runs through the heart of every man". So we were just talking about that yesterday, and then today b&c used it when we were talking about the baby since she's a comic genius. I realize now that in writing the post I gave myself the line, but it was hers. There. I hope the back story helps.

Psychotoddler: As our baby would say, PT seeeleee!

Toby Katz: Holy cow! I don't think a more succinct and terrifying argument for contraception has been made.

Ralphie: Ahhh, ze allusion to Maurice Chevalier is tres cosmopolitan, no?
 

Is wee one doing some teething, perhaps molars, at this stage? That's why she has a wake-up call at 2 AND at 5 a.m.? Or is she just checking up on Mom and Dad to see if they are sleeping peacefully?

(Maybe she just had too much turkey and stuffing over the holiday weekend and it's thrown her delicate system, sleep included, off...)
 

Torontopearl: I have no idea. Do molars happen at this age? It's incredible. I forget every stage each kid go through so that it's still a shock when the next kid goes through it. I'm going to be a useless grandparent (God willing).
 

I know what you mean. Outta sight, outta mind. It's scary that often we deal better as parents with the practical rather than with theory. Unless we walk around with child-rearing reference books in hand, we don't know what's happening to our kids until it's happening. "Yup, honey, see that red bump at the back of her mouth; see her fisting constantly and biting down hard on her brother's shoulder...yup, that's a molar breaking through."

Hope you and the Mighty BeanzTM had a great holiday weekend.

BTW, did the Cross Morph pen arrive yet? Probably not, or all around the world, in Steve Martin's "The Jerk" style, we'd be hearing, "The new Cross Morph pen is here...the new Cross Morph pen is here!"
 

All this talk about Good and Evil being present in the same person can't be a conservative idea. You see, I learned on "Desperate Housewives" this week that conservatives divide the world into good and evil because they can't bear to admit that good and evil can exist in the same person. So this Solnitz, uh, Solyns, ah, that Russian dude must be a Leftist - the kind of person intelligent and sophisticated enough to grasp such subtleties.

(And if he was against the Soviets, that would make them right-wing fanatics. Just so we have all of that straight.)
 

Torontopearl: The Bean Bunch had a wonderful Thanksgiving. Thank you.

You're very sweet to ask about my recently lost pen. It hasn't even been shipped yet. I miss it every single day. My life is empty and without purpose.

Ralphie: It's incredible what we've touched on in a thread meant to joke about the misbehavior of our toddler. I normally would only differ with "Desperate Housewives" with only the greatest trepidation. It turns out that this is the deepest difference between conservatism and liberalism. Liberals believe that man is essentially good, and that evil derives from flawed economic or social or cultural environments. Conservatives believe in the fundamentally religious idea that man is a flawed creature and that evil derives from his baser inclinations. In this view, man can be incrementally improved, but never perfected.

Oh, and liberals also don't approve of me using the word "man" to mean human. They only use the word "man" to mean despotic authority structure, as in "standing up to the man." Word.
 

Ain't life grand.