Thanks.

This is a few days late, but since it's still November, I believe I can get away with a Thanksgiving post.

Over the weekend, I spent an inordinate amount of time sifting through old photos while at my parent's house. To my horror and delight, I found that not much has changed since I was five years old.

I still have unruly blond hair. I still get food on my face. I still hate wearing pants. I still over-accessorize. And I am still to this day, the happiest kid on the planet.

I am thankful for that five year old wriggling inside of me. She is enthusiastic, friendly, sweet, quirky, funny, scrappy, smart, and obsessed with ice cream. She makes the adult me love every single day of this unbearable hell, enviable paradise, brutal, and beautiful experience we call life.

On that note, I leave you with this query, courtesy of Mary Oliver:

I ask you again: if you have not been enchanted by this adventure--your life--what would do for you?

Fugitive.

Lately, Thing 1 and I have been locking horns. I'll write more about these episodes later (there is so much fodder, trust) but suffice to say, I was over-joyed when last week, she decided to throw me a bone and stop spewing "NO" every third word. My relief was tragically temporary as she appears to be back in her Defiant Diva saddle. Which brings me to my question:

When playing hide-and-go-seek with a four-year-old, is it wrong to wish they would just stay hidden forever?

This afternoon, we were playing the age old game between lunch and story time. I found Thing 2 easily enough -she generally squats behind a chair leg- but Thing 1 cleverly kept cover. When I still couldn't find her after several minutes of honest searching --not the "gee, I wonder where the girls could be?" when clearly, they're standing in front of the window curtains, but actually looking-- the thought briefly crossed my mind that maybe she had had enough, and run away.

Is it bad that I didn't feel the least bit concerned? Alarmed? I figured that when Mother and Father returned home, I'd explain that #1 misplaced herself, probably down the road and was no doubt enjoying the kindness of neighbors. I mean, I enjoyed the same misadventures myself.

One time when I was maybe 5ish, I decided to make a break for it. Undoubtedly, one or both of my parental units had failed me in a grossly offensive, epic manner, such as not letting me eat my toothpaste straight from the tube, or cruelly measuring only one cap full of Mr. Bubble into my bath. I had to show them and so after dinner, I marched upstairs to my bedroom. I pulled out an overnight bag and started a-packing. I effortlessly enlisted my little sister to join the expedition, as she idolized me and also at the age of two lacked the brain development to operate a straw.

Mom came in.

"What are you two doing?" she asked.
"We're packing to run away," I replied. "Do you want to help?"
"Sure."

And so, there we were: Mom, Clare, and Phyllis preparing for departure. We packed the essentials: hair brush, clean socks, My Little Pony and set off. Mom opened the front door for us and waved good-bye.

"Have fun!"

Clare and I made it to the end of the driveway and I declared the ditch near the sidewalk our first rest stop. The sun was starting to set and I distinctly remember cursing myself for not pinching a jar of pickles from the fridge before we left. Not only are they delicious for any meal, but I could also happily drink the juice in case we couldn't find a natural source of drinking water.

My little belly started to think more and more of the pickles. Not only had we not packed pickles, we in fact hadn't packed any food at all. We also forgot Clare's blankie for warmth. I began to carefully weigh our options: we could lie in the ditch, hoping for a magical change in fortune. We could walk next door to the Fox's house for dinner. Or we could re-enter our own front door and kill two birds with one stone.

Regrettably, we schlepped up the front steps and opened the door which had been kindly left unlocked. We were welcomed back and not to brag or anything, but I'm pretty sure no one had hoped we would stay hidden.

Pee pee.

Today, Thing 1 decided to take a nap with her little sister, Thing 2. I liked this because as of about four weeks ago, #1 decided she had officially outgrown naps, leaving me to entertain a raucous four-year-old for seven hours straight, without the advantage of swats from a meter stick, slotted wooden spoon, or any of the other objects my mother or father would have chosen (love you guys!)

After story time, I excused myself to go "do big girl stuff" such as crush up a Xanax tab into my water and try to forget the previous four days of work. After a while, the peeps and whispers melt into silence and I figure I'm home free...

I'm one hundred pages into The Diving Bell and the Butterfly -enjoying the slow drain on my emotional taps as I follow the burden of Bauby- when I hear feet scampering across the bedroom floor. The girls are awake and #2 is naked, her wet diaper on the nightstand.

I take #2 to put on a dry diaper while #1 supervises the proceedings and also divulges to me that #2 peed twice. NO! Three times!

"She peed three times in her diaper?" I ask.

"No. Only once in her diaper."

I am just this side of fearful as I begin to dread the possible answers to my next logical question, but I inquire anyhow:

"OK. Where else did she pee then?"

"One time in the twashcan and another time on the fwoor next to the twashcan!" My, my, my what a kind informant.

The beauty of children at this tender age (let's face it: maybe the only one) is that they pretty much don't lie ever. It's like the honest truth just tumbles out of their mouth; a tight-rope walker falling to a swift, messy death. While I admire this fact, the adult in me is still thinking, Really? Why the hell would anyone ever pee into a trashcan? Sure, I peed in a dark parking lot once but I was a too-drunk adult and I really, really had to go but there was nowhere in sight, plus I was wearing a dress so at least I didn't have to mess with the trickery of pants. But I digress...but seriously, in what universe does it make sense to piss into a trash can? A two-year-old universe apparently. Furthermore, #2 is not fully potty-trained, which begs the question: why -in the name of all that is good and holy- can she not get her crap to land in the toilet (she prefers her pants on occasion- fun for me!) but she can make her urine trickle perfectly into a wicker garbage receptacle. WHY?

"But don't worry," #1 says. "I cleaned up the fwoor with mommy's shirt."

Well, kid. There's that.
Thanks.

The great outdoors.

I'll just go ahead and stop apologizing now for my continual re-lapses into blog comas. Anyway, the weather in Austin has been perfect: sunny, cool but with a tinge of warmness, sometimes breezy. And while the ravenous mosquitoes have not heeded my pleas to kindly eat shit and die, they have at least slightly calmed themselves...probably lulled into a deep winter sleep from their summer feeding frenzy.

The weather and buzzing predator count is good enough for the girls I nanny to finally "play outside." Now, this is not quite the playing outside I enjoyed as a tiny thing in northern Virginia: long before the days of GPS, cell phones and microchipping (my dog has this in her neck, has the technology moved to children yet? anyone?) my parents more or less tossed us five kids outside and assumed we would return at the end of the day mostly in one piece. If we got lost in the woods, we had to rely solely on our wits and ability to sob loudly enough for a pigeon to get the message, fly home, and relay it to the neighbor's cocker spaniel -Muffin- and hope she could bark the message to a trustworthy adult.

I now work at a house in the most popular and expensive zip code of south Austin. Everyone has a privacy fence leading to locked homes and no one has a screen door. The kids can't walk down to the stream to catch crawfish or minnows, but they can walk to Flipnotics for a cafe au lait (best one in town, btw).

So I was in the kitchen loading dishes, I told the girls to go outside and play. They blinked. "You have to come with us! Mommy always comes with us!" I told them I'd be watching from the kitchen window. They considered this for a moment and -emboldened by their new freedom- both stripped naked and ran out the back door.

I remember The Mother telling me early on that the girls should always be supervised in the backyard. Honestly, by the way she talked you'd think the place was littered with landmines and war heads, with child molesters lurking in every tree branch. As I watched from the kitchen window as #1 picked up an 8 foot piece of bamboo and started swinging it wildly at the hanging hurricane lamps, I felt fulfilled. Here is what every kid needs: the ability to be out of doors, naked as a jaybird, taking their four-year-old lives into their hands, and perilously dangling it at the edge of impending doom and physical harm. This, dear reader, is what we call learning experiences. Character building. In the end, both girls kept their appendages and eye balls and I had an hour of time to read quietly.

Yup, my mom and dad had it right.