Scene: Thomas on the changing table, getting a fresh diaper. John standing by Thomas' head, whapping his little brother gently with a rolled-up pair of his socks.

Me: John, what are you doing?

John: I esdingish... I estdingishing Domas.

Me: You're what?

John: Esdingishing him.

Me: (incredulous) You're extinguishing him?

John: Uh-huh.

Me: John, do you know what extinguish means?

John: Yes. Yike fire.

Me: Fire?

John: Yes. Domas yike fire and I esdingishing him. (Whaps him again, to much baby giggling.)

6:37 AM. John opens his door and steps confidently out into the hallway. "Dere's da seven, Mommy!" he announces.

"John, the seven's in the wrong spot. It needs to be the first number. Go back to bed." He climbs back in, obediently, and I close the door behind me.

I stand at the kitchen counter, making Joe's lunch. Joe is in the shower. Thomas is starting to whimper into the monitor. And from behind John's door I hear the sound of cheerful, albeit tone-deaf, singing. I pause and listen.

"Manoor, manoor, manoooooooooooooor," he croons. "Manooooooor, manoormanoor...."

Scene, a kitchen table. Two little boys sit, one at either end, in matching booster seats. They eat their breakfast peacefully, the one scooping Cheerios out of a bowl, the other grabbing them off his tray. From the back of the house come the sounds of their parents discussing weekend plans.

Daddy: One thing we really need to do is go through the bedroom closets and take everything out... and throw it away.

Mommy: (laughs) I actually made quite a dent in Thomas' closet earlier this week and went through a lot of stuff.

We walk back into the kitchen. John looks up. "I wanna see da dent in Domases coset!" he says eagerly.

"Um, honey, that's what's called a figure of speech. It's not a real indentation, it just means I did a lot of work on a job," I explain.

"A dent IS an indendashun," John says gravely.

"Er, yes, it is. But--"

"I wanna see da indendashun!"

"It's a figure of speech, John," says Joe.

John looks at him. "I wanna see da figger of speech!"

Joe's parents were here last weekend. Every Kline visit involves some home improvement project, and this time it was the replacement of our blechy kitchen faucet. They happened to be getting a new kitchen themselves, and brought up their old sink. Turns out that a sink with rounded corners will not fit in a hole cut for a sink with square corners, so the sinks were not swappable. Our kitchen was temporarily out of commission, and was a royal mess, while Joe and his Dad discovered this fact and two kitchen sinks lay in our yard.

It was at this moment that John decided to be helpful. Dashing in from the outside, he ran to the open undersink cabinet and turned on the water. We leave the ensuing soggy scene to your imagination, and suggest that your imagination likely falls short of the reality.

Not to be outdone, Thomas watched all the commotion intently. And at the dinner table afterwards, his little arms shot out in a grand sweeping motion. Crash went his grandfather's wine glass to the floor. The last shattered pieces had hardly settled when those little hands flashed out again and grabbed his grandfather's placemat. Smash went the water glass, in hot pursuit of the wine. Joe spent the next twenty minutes in a slow dance with the shop vac while children and chairs were swiftly bundled to the other side of the room.

...one parent calls it a "weedwhacker" and one calls it a "weedeater"?

A. A child who calls it a "weedwhackadeeder."

That would be the sound of Mommy finally succumbing to the virus that has laid our little family waste, as Aunt Margaret succinctly put it. It's been so long since I've last been sick that I was beginning to think I was nigh-invulnerable. (All together, Tick fans! "Nigh? What the heck is nigh?")

It is gratifying to observe that when Mommy goes under, it takes three adults to do her job: one to handle John, one to handle Thomas, and one to clean the house/do the laundry/cook the meals/wash the dishes/get the groceries/etc/etc. Unfortunately, there have only been two spare adults about the premises, viz., Mom and Dad, so all three categories have suffered somewhat. John in particular is not taking my illness well, alternating between lovable concern ("I gif you hugs, Mommy, and dat will make you feel bedder") and flamboyant wailings and gnashings of teeth. So far the best cure for the latter has been throwing him outside with Grandpa to go haul firewood. Grandpa gives him the biggest logs he can carry, and when he's no longer able to carry them he rolls them along the ground.

Thomas is oblivious to Mommy's distress. He has discovered that he really likes solid food. We have since dubbed him The Baby that Ate New York City. Food is happy. Food is good. Sleep, not so much. I came into the kitchen this morning and Mom asked me how the night went. "Well, I got up to feed him three times, got up to rock him once (he had a bad bubble), and only had to bounce his Amby half a dozen times or so. The longest he let me sleep at one stretch was two hours, and I've been up since 5:00. He did great!"

Daddy comes home tonight. Thank you, God.

Christopher Robin had wheezles and sneezles, they bundled him into his bed.

Thomas is the third Kline casualty of this mystery virus. Of course he was fine when we went in for his six-month checkup on Monday. Tuesday he started running a fever. Wednesday he was miserable. Today he lost his voice and was reduced to hoarse little croakings and squeaks.

They gave him what goes with a cold in the nose, and some more for a cold in the head.

John hadn't quite finished his own prescription of antibiotics before we started dosing Thomas regularly with Tylenol and ibuprofen. Add that to his newest prescription change for his reflux and we've had quite the merry-go-round of medications.

They wondered if wheezles could turn into measles, if sneezles would turn into mumps; they examined his chest for a rash, and the rest of his body for swellings and lumps.

Of course now it's the eve of a Friday... will he get better or worse over the weekend, when there's no easy access to the doctor? Oh, and he seems to have extra-sensitive skin too, which is breaking out in a rash wherever he gets some solid food on himself. They gave us some prescription ointment for that too. Sigh.

They expounded the reazles for sneezles and wheezles, the manner of measles when new. They said "If he freezles in draughts and in breezles, then PHTHEEZLES may even ensue."

And I have a sinking feeling that although I've made it through the entire winter without getting sick once, this time there's no escape. John I could keep at arm's length; Joe kept his distance of his own accord. The baby, on the other hand, has no such courtesy and whenever I pick him up -- which is often, due to those irresistibly pitiful whimperings -- he's coughing directly into my face. I'm doomed.

I swore I'd never do it. Too humiliating, I said! Too cutesy-wootsy! Never never!

And yet yesterday they jumped into my shopping cart. I couldn't help it. Well, actually, as long as I'm confessing, I could help it, but somehow I didn't want to. I bought them with a clear head, in full possession of my mental faculties... I think. Maybe not. In which case I'm off the hook.

Anyhow, next Sunday, John and Thomas will be appearing in matching little Easter outfits... vests and oxford shirts and plaid pants. ARGH so cute.

John and I went out to do some yardwork this morning during the baby's nap. I clipped the old woody peony stems from around the porch swing and raked out the great drifts of dead leaves, while John scuffled merrily through the piles and I pretended to be mad at him for "messing up my leaves," which he thought great fun.

The pretense abruptly stopped when he stomped through the new peonies, just showing a few inches above the ground. He was walking across the flowerbed and stumbled over the brick edging, smashing some of the flowers he had been warned away from. "John, come on! Don't step on the flowers!" I scolded, before I could stop myself.

Looking up, he said calmly, "I'm sorry, Mommy. I'm trying to be careful."

He was instantly enfolded in a hug by a repentant Mommy. "Oh, honey, I know," I said, stroking his hair.

"I forgive you, Mommy," he said.

I'm still recovering from that one, and here it is almost 9 PM...

Thomas, that is. After many days of false starts and lots of rocking back and forth and shrieking, he is now officially mobile. The only trouble is, he's going backwards. It makes him so mad to get farther and farther away from a toy he's trying to get to...

At the present moment, the toy he's trying to get to is his father's foot. Joe is lying sick on the living room floor. John is swarming over him, shouting that he and Daddy are stuck up the Six Pine Trees and can't get down. Thomas is flapping arms and legs for all he's worth and maneuvering steadily away from them into the kitchen, rump first.

Excuse me while I go throw a certain hyper toddler outside.

John spent the morning playing in and around and under a giant house made of bedsheets draped over the living room couches and coffee table. One end of the coffee table alternates duty as his altar and his cookstove; today it was the latter and he whipped up batches of pompom soup and wooden bead bread.

Later those pompoms and beads turned into manure in his tractor trailer, which John the Farmer proceeded to spread all over the living room fields. (He was fascinated by a live tractor chugging up and down our street, getting filled up with the stuff across the way at the dairy farm by a little loader and then coming back down the hill to spread the load over the field by our house. It's been slightly stinky around here the last few days if the wind is just right.)

Later still, after I made a strawberry smoothie (yummy!) which he refused even to taste because he's convinced he doesn't like strawberries, even though he's never actually tasted a single one, he made pompom/bead smoothies in the blender for me.

So I suppose the things have been rather on his mind recently, and mixing with our attempts to impart even a tiny bit of liturgical knowledge, so it wasn't that out of left field when he stopped chewing today at lunch to announce "Pompom Sunday."

John is sick again. Throwing up mucus, on antibiotics, generally miserable. Yet in the midst of it he's showing a new solicitousness. He stared at his lone-piece-of-bread dinner tonight, whining piteously that it was too hard to bring it to his mouth, even when it was generously torn into small bits for him. Never ate a single bite. I let him down, and he trotted over to the living room floor and sat down for the rosary.

"We're offering this one for Daddy, that he get well soon," I said before starting. For yes, Daddy is failing too, and he spent dinner lying motionless on the couch huddled in a heavy Polartec and afghan. (For those of you who know Joe the Human Furnace, that is saying something right there.)

After the rosary John got up and looked at me. "Is dere somesing we can do to make Daddy feew bedder?" he asked earnestly.

"I don't know, honey," I said. "Why don't you go ask him."

He did, peering with concern into Joe's face. "Daddy, is dere somesing we can do to make you feew bedder?"

"Thank you, John. I'd like a glass of water," was the reply.

John lit up. "Daddy would yike a gass of wadder," he informed me. I got him one and told him to take it (carefully!) to Daddy. He did this proudly, albeit very slowly and with exaggerated care. His father thanked him gravely.

"Anyding else, Daddy?"

"No, thank you, John, I'm all right now."

"He's aw wight now," John beamed at me.

Later that evening, Joe read John his bedtime story (still in his prone position on the couch) while I nursed the baby. Then Joe put him to bed. Coming back out and resuming his blanket and pillows, he smiled. "Pooh was still in his crib," he said. "I said, 'Silly Pooh, still in bed. Hm. I wonder if Pooh is sick, too.' And John said, 'I will sing him a quiet song to help him feew bedder.'"

John is asserting his independence more, both of his physical processes ("This cut will get bedder all by itself, with nobody helping it") and with regard to his proximity to parental units (shouting at me to go away if I get too close -- that is, closer than 200 feet or so -- during our backyard rambles). Unless he's really in a bind, assistance of any sort, in any activity, is met with loud protestations, and when he does find it necessary to ask for help he's angry about it.

Even though we're grumpily short on snow this year, it's been cold enough for any fan of winter, and for the last couple days I've built a fire in the basement woodstove. The first time John saw me do it was the morning my friend Christy was here with her two boys. I hadn't even realized he was paying attention until I closed the doors on the blazing logs and stood up. Turning around, I met his gaze, intent and appreciative. "Mommy!" he said, surprised, "you made a fire all by yourself, with nobody helping you!"

Yes, dear, I was a Girl Scout for more than a decade, and I'm not utterly dependent on your father, you know... just mostly.

I've started collecting picture books using the list in Cay Gibson's Catholic Mosaic, a study guide that follows the liturgical year with children's books about the different saints and feast days. Each liturgical season we add a couple to the collection. For Lent we bought Saint Valentine and Patrick: Patron Saint of Ireland, since those are the two holidays John will see the most of in his surroundings (i.e., the sea of pink and red hearts in every store for the one, and the deluge of shamrocks for the other). They're a little beyond him at this age, but it's easy enough to alter the wording, and so far if he sees something in a book he's much more likely to "take it in" than if I simply tell him about it.

At the same time, he's suddenly All About Pooh. He used to sleep with and cart around three rabbits: Flopsy Rabbit, Peter Rabbit, and Benjamin Bunny. Pooh waited, untouched and ignored, in John's little rocker chair in the corner, for months. Then one day, as I was putting him down for a nap, John announced that he didn't want his rabbits, he wanted Pooh. I got him Pooh. And it's been Pooh ever since.

"Are you ready to get up?" I ask him each morning. "Yup, with Pooh," he says. I lift him out of the crib and he trots down the hall to set Pooh carefully at the piano. Sometimes I use Pooh as a prop to coach him to sleep at naptime. "I don' wannoo dake a nap," he says. "Okay, then just be quiet and still so Pooh can take his nap," I tell him, and in the course of being duly quiet and still John falls asleep himself.

One day this didn't work. "Pooh doesn' wannoo dake a nap eeder," he informed me.

"Well, you guys can't go outside and play in the snow until you take your nap. You tell Pooh that you need to hurry up and take your naps so you can go out and play."

"Pooh can't go owside," he said.

I hadn't thought of this. "Oh. But he can watch you from the windowsill."

John and Pooh promptly conked out.

We used to have a big stack of picture books from the library, but they've all been returned, and so far are not missed. John wants nothing but Pooh stories. So I oblige him, and read straight Milne at breakfast, lunch and snacktime. John has taken to randomly shouting "Ee-ers o i a-ors!" [what Tigger said with a mouthful of acorns: "Tiggers don't like haycorns!"]

Would Montessori approve? Well, possibly not. The question of reality vs. fantasy in children's books has been hurting my brain for months (maybe years, by now). But after going back and forth and round and round, I think I've decided to go with Charlotte Mason's approach, in which the deciding factor in choosing a book for a child is not "Is it real?" but "Is it good literature?" And by that measure, Pooh gets a round of applause. (And possibly a throat lozenge, as I read "In Which Tigger Comes to the Forest and Has Breakfast" for the fifty-seventh time.)

Anyhow. One never knows how all the things John is exposed to sort themselves out in his head. As evidenced by John's response when the package man valiantly delivered our saint books today in spite of the nasty ice storm we've been having. "Look, John, we got two books! One on Saint Valentine and one on Saint Patrick!"

"Uh-huh! And Saint Pooh," he said.

John is enjoying being the "big buhyer." But I wonder how long it will last. Thomas is still "yiddle," but he is strong. He's been grabbing the toy bar on his bouncy seat for some time now, and over the last week or so he started doing pullups on it, lifting his body completely out of the seat except for his situpon, which must be firmly strapped in at all times now. Tonight at dinner he sat in his seat on the floor, between Joe's and John's chairs. I could just see his eyes over the edge of the table.

Tiny hands went up. Tiny fingers curled around the edge of the toy bar. And with a most unbabylike "Grrrrrraaaaaahhhhh!" he ripped the thing completely off. It fell in his lap, and he picked it up and tried to eat it.

He has also had the annoying habit of somehow extracting his legs from the legs of his sleepers and either bunching them up impossibly small in the sleeper crotch, or bursting the snaps and sticking his legs through. When he fusses at night, we now automatically feel his legs, and if they feel like a cannonball instead of baby legs, we unzip him and set him to rights.

Tired of this game, I suggested last night that we put him in a sweatsuit instead of a sleeper, in the hopes that they would stay on him better and thus wreak less havoc on his sleep (and ours). He slept no better. At 5:30 AM I finished feeding him and set him back in his bed. Then I checked his legs. I could make out two feet, but something didn't seem quite right. I unzipped him and felt about, laughed silently, and zipped him back up. Then I climbed back into bed, exhausted.

Joe scooched over and gave me a sympathetic hug. "Our son has no pants on," I mumbled, and dozed off.

A key element in teaching children everyday life skills is keeping everything tidy. In the crucial sensitive period for order, their world needs to be well-organized. If taught where things belong and how to return them correctly when they have finished using them, children internalize this sense of order and carry it with them for the rest of their lives. (p.82)

On waking up this morning and coming into the living room to see my binder and papers spread across the coffee table, where I had left them the night before: "Hm. Dese tings are still out. We bedder put dem away!"

If you think of the household chores as a family activity in which children are welcome to participate even when they are very young, you can instill in your children a sense of pride in keeping the house and yard neat and clean. Work should never be thought of as a chore, but as an activity that leads to a sense of order and completion. (p.98)

5 PM and I'm beat. I collapse at the kitchen table and stare at my ever-present pile of books and papers. John notices the dirty dishes on the counter, drags a chair to the sink, climbs up, and commands, "Waz dishes wif me!"

"Honey, Mommy's tired. I need to rest a few minutes, and then I'll wash dishes with you."

"Okay," he agrees. "Are you weady yet?"

"No, not quite," I smile, weakly.

"Are you weady yet?"

"Sweetie, just a couple min--"

"Are you weady yet?"

I wearily got up and washed the dishes with him.

A brief Lenten update before I go to bed. We went to Holy Family for Ash Wednesday Mass, scurrying into the vestibule just in time for Father to grin at us before he headed up the aisle. We found a seat fairly close to the front and immediately in front of friends of ours from daily Mass, just in case I suddenly needed an extra pair of hands. But John was fairly still and attentive, and the baby was calm, so we managed fine. Until it was time to go get our ashes.

"I don't want to!" John said, loudly and firmly. So I left him there in the pew. He slid back and forth along the kneelers until we returned, and then he stared at our foreheads, reaching out to touch Thomas' and sprinkling ash dust on the baby's nose.

The precedent had been set: John no longer had to join us in line. Sure enough, he refused to go up for Communion also. There was a glitch with the number of vessels and they were shorthanded, so Thomas and I had to take a long and circuitous route through the church up to Father. I kept glancing back at our pew, and watched John's progression from boredom to awareness that he didn't know where we were, through rising panic, and just when he seemed about to both burst into tears and burst from the pew, I managed to catch his eye, and he visibly calmed. The rest of Mass passed without incident.

I really dropped the ball on my Lenten preparations, and so far the only visible signs of the season in our house are three purple crosses (one on the fridge, one on the bathroom mirror, and one on the window above the changing table), each with a different prayer on it. Oh: and a tiny bowl of homemade palm ashes that John and I made downstairs on the hearth. (He was much impressed.) But this evening I finished up a poster that will go on the fridge tomorrow. John loved the Advent calendar so much that I wanted some similar way for him to mark the days of Lent, so this is a purple posterboard with a white square for each day that will be crossed off each evening. The squares are laid out in a "path" pattern leading up to a large Easter cross, and each square lists any information relevant to a 2-year-old (Valentine's Day, Daylight Saving Time, etc.), plus something to count.

The counting thing is an idea from Guiding Your Catholic Preschooler, to help little kids grasp the concept of almsgiving. Whether it's coats in the closet, keys on the piano, or pieces of silverware in the drawer, each day John will have something to count, and for each item he will get a penny to put in an alms jar. At the end of Lent we'll donate the contents.

Fasting is another hard concept when you're 2. So tomorrow, taking another idea from the book, I'll go to Sam's and come back with 40 (small, nonperishable) food items to put in a specially designated lower cabinet. We'll designate a large container or box, and each day John will get to choose one item from the cabinet to put in it. The box gets donated along with the alms jar.

Will he get all this? Any of it? Or will it sail right over his head? I dunno. But it can't hurt. So we'll see how it goes.

6:50 PM. John and I are washing dishes. Simultaneously, the phone starts ringing and the napping baby starts crying. I briefly hold the phone to the wailing monitor to show Joe why I'm not answering, and hand it off to John so he can talk to Daddy while I run down the hall.

When I return, lugging a sleepy and grumpy Thomas, John is not talking. He is holding a dripping phone and punching every button he can find.

Mea cowboy, mea cowboy, mea Mexican cowboy.

The phone spends the next 20 minutes buzzing wildly in spite of a blank black screen. John is fascinated. "Is still winging, Mommy," he repeats. Really, I mutter to myself, could it possibly be because you threw it in the sink? HM?

I pry off the back and dab at the dampness. The screen flickers to life, long enough for me to grab a voice mail from Joe that says the train is running late. Then it dies again and goes back to buzzing. "Call Daddy," John suggests. "Daddy will fix it."

"Sweetie, I can't call Daddy. The phone is broken."

"Da fone is boken, so call Daddy to fix it!"

We go round and round like this for some time, both of us getting heated and frustrated. Finally, an hour behind schedule, Joe shows up and dismantles the thing, which is still drying out. He did manage to salvage the SIM card, though, and transfer it to his own phone.

So we can add a trip to Cingular to my list of errands to run this weekend...

"I will save the rest of my yap [nap] for tomoyow."

John hadn't "played Mass" in over a month, and I was beginning to think, with some sadness, that he had lost interest in it. But then we sat down at his little table to do some coloring. We have these beeswax crayon blocks that are more for playing with color than actual drawing, since John is too young to hold a regular crayon. So we scribbled and blended colors (surprisingly fun for Mommy, too) and covered sheets of newsprint.

I got up to tend to the baby. John looked at the papers thoughtfully.

When I'd finished with the baby I discovered that the papers had been distributed all around the room. I was about to ask John to gather them up again when he went to one, picked it up with both hands, and held it above his head. He walked to the coffee table, laid the paper carefully down on one end, and started his old chant, but with a twist this time: "Keeryay eeyayson. Keestay eeyayson. Keeryay eeyayson."

"Goria in ekshelsees deo," he added. I jumped. "Dat means Gory to God in da highest," he added. I stared. "I a beest, Mommy."

"A beast?" I asked, stupidly.

He frowned at me. "A beest."

"Oh, a priest." (Duh.)

"Mass is not over yet," he continued. "First we say more Ahyayyooyas. An den I wead more goshpels. An den we say AMEN," he said, with a flourish. "And den we will be done."

We have to be very careful not to pay too much obvious attention to this kind of play, however, as his focus is shifting from the play itself to our reaction to it. Yesterday John rounded up all the blankets off his bed, plus a baby blanket, and laid them out over the coffee table.

"Dees are altar coffs," he said to himself. Then, looking at me: "Did you hear me say dees are altar coffs, Mommy?"