Stir Crazy and It's Only November

I'm not sure I can survive the winter.

Not emotionally, at least.

Take away one day of working out -- two hours of time with adult people away from those who reach my waist or less -- and I'm a basket case. OK, take away my workout and instead give me two miserable weather days cramped up with three children in a small house where our most entertaining option is a game of GIANT BABY (don't ask), and I'm losing it.

OK, so you had to ask. Giant baby involves me hold the baby, who isn't yet vertical all the time, up at waist level or higher in a vertical position and chasing the older girls in circles through the house. The baby loves it. She laughs and squeals. The girls love it. They laugh and squeal at a frequency that might shatter crystal. The dogs think someone is getting hurt and they get nervous and bristly. It makes my head and back hurt.

Yes, for two days the four of us have spent eight hours together with nothing more interesting to look at than the television. Papi comes in on the tail end of the day for his dose of fun and I want to run screaming from the house as soon as supper is on the table.

Tuesday, my daughter noted my frazzled look and told me she'd buckle them in. I went back to the house with tired tears seeping from my eyes.

I love my granddaughters. Please, don't get me wrong. I would not send them to anyone else for daycare. I can't imagine the days without them. But I'm programmed to be outside and they have spent so much time with me that their programming likewise is get outdoors. Chase a leaf, splash in a puddle, ride a bike, go for a hike, drag brush, pretend to be birds and soar around the yard. Run, squeal, move. Inside, well, we're all a bit stir crazy and it comes out by the end of the day.

We all need an outlet for our energy that doesn't involve running in circles around the butcher block island, dumping out or picking up all the toys in the playroom, or simply torturing one another out of frustration.

Last winter I bought a bounce house that will fit quite tidily on the front porch. Unfortunately, it's been too cold or wet to deploy it. It will also fit in the playroom, thank God.

So to fight the frustration we cleared the center of the playroom floor, piling toys anywhere they would fit,shoved the pack and play against the book case, and engaged the bounce house. Even E3 loved it, although she had to content herself with mainly watching the other girls as I wouldn't let her inside while they were bouncing. Her glee when I enforced a break and let her crawl inside, however, was thorough.

Although I didn't get the fix I needed, and had to put up with the rearranging, refereeing and noise of the big blower, I realized it was a small price to pay for lowering the overall discontent in the house. Once again I had to remind myself that I'm the adult, and I'm the one who has to figure out how to make things better, and that even if I seem to make things better only for the little people, my sacrifice will be rewarded with a bit more sanity.

So I guess I'll be firing up the little bounce house until the girls get tired of it, which may not take long as a summer of outings has introduced them to bigger and better bounce houses with climbing walls and slides. Yep, that was my fault. I let them go through the adult sized obstacle course a few too many times. But those are also available and it could be that I decide the investment, if I can find a place for it, is well worth it.

While the rural county where I live has come a long way in developing outdoor recreation, our indoor opportunities, especially for preschoolers, are pretty much nonexistent, despite some large governmental lobbies that I could see housing an indoor playground quite handily. My husband says the noise would be a bother to the workers, but I think closed doors would take care of that and, having worked in one of those buildings, I know there's not a lot that needs quiet that doesn't get a closed door already.

So instead I'll be taking advantage of good old McDonald's and its monster indoor playground. But first I have to find a way to avoid the Happy Meals, because face it, they have the nutritional value of the box in which they are packed, plus a piece of junk toy to boot. Once that hurdle is cleared, I think I'll start scheduling a weekly McDonald's run -- maybe for ice cream? I'm sure toting E3 through the structure will give me a great workout and get me out of the house, so it could turn into a win-win situation.

Oh, I forgot to mention I play on the equipment, too. Hey, they didn't have those when I was a kid, and three preschoolers gives me a great excuse to be the scary lady on the slide.

The Fun and Frustration of Feeding Preschoolers

Do you remember the aggravation of feeding a small child?

I think it's one of the things we forget the quickest as our children grow. Oh, we remember in some drug-hazed way the pain of labor, recall the occasional embarrassment of department store tantrums, aggravation of potty training, and the bone deep exhaustion of interrupted sleep for months and months on end. We remember diapers, and car seats and children drawing on the walls.

Among all the things we have to cope with and manage when dealing with small children, I think the thing we forget most thoroughly, or at least it was true in my case, is how hard they are to feed.

I'm not talking about spooning baby food into the mouth of a small crawler who eats like a baby bird with her little mouth open. Unless it's a food she rejects, in which case you're scraping it off her chin, the high chair tray and possibly your clothing. Or even the general messiness as children learn to feed themselves, which can be dealt with somewhat like an organized serial killer with a lot of drop clothes and clean up, but even then you're likely to find food caked in strange places (enough for CSI to bust said serial killer).

No, I'm referring to children who can quite competently feed themselves and even manage (most of the time) to drink from a cup with no lid without a major catastrophe.

Those are the ones who drive their parents, and in my case grandmother, stark raving insane. Really, meal time can be so stressful that I wind up with a bowl of cereal at 10 p.m. because I just can't deal with them and try to eat, too. It's ridiculous.

Oh, I remember my children going through food cycles. I think I still do that myself. There would be days on end where, if asked, my son wanted nothing but peanut butter and jelly. My daughter, on the other hand, probably never wanted the same meal twice and still doesn't. I could deal with that by stocking up on their favorites. At least I would know they were eating.

Instead I'm dealing with two little girls who one day will devour a food and the next turn up their collective noses.

E1 is the ring leader in the food rebellion, as is often the case, and I know it's a three meal a day fiasco. Weighing in at a hefty 32 pounds and 4 years old (note sarcasm intended), we tend to worry about her eating enough. So when she requests a particular food for any meal in which individual orders are taken, we try to deliver. When that food is set in front of her, however, she's as likely to declare it "yucky," or spend 45 minutes rearranging it on her plate, as she is to eat it. Her list of go-to foods is really short and even then I sometimes don't feel like she eats enough. Of course, it is hard to remember that her stomach is really quite small so I never demand she clean her plate, as long as she samples what is on it.

Granted, she will almost always eat an apple or a stick of cheese, loves cold hot dogs (most of the time), turkey and ham, and will usually eat a carrot with some buttermilk dressing. But seriously, can you live on that?

Since she is quite outspoken, her food rebellion often overflows onto E2. If she declares it yucky -- a word I've banned at the table -- then of course her younger sibling will likewise turn up her nose. Never mind that neither of them have actually tasted the dish which usually contains only food I know they like.

At least once a day we try to sit down together for a balanced meal. Well, I may or may not eat then, but I do prepare a meal and sit with them. My meal time, however, is just as likely to be spent negotiating with E1 over how much she has to eat. If we can keep her drama to a minimum, E2 will often polish off her plate while we're debating. Often E2 finishes her meal and is excused before E1 and I have a food treaty ironed out.

We've had some balanced meal successes, although I'm always looking for more and have a stack of "kid friendly" recipes to try with my fingers crossed. I'm always on the lookout for something they might eat and expect that's a fairly common phenomenon.

Both love Lunchables because they put them together themselves, although I now get ingredients to assemble my own, serve them with carrots and they are allowed no more than once or twice a week; they expressed a love for Campbell's Chunky Chicken Noodle when I opened one for myself and they wound up eating it (but we've not tried a second round yet); virtually anything that smacks of pizza goes down well (think pizza casserole with whole wheat noodles and limited ingredients); they will consistently devour chicken breasts topped with a Greek yogurt and parmesan mixture; and the cheeseburger soup which we all made together turned out to be a hit even if it did dirty three pans and require a lot of chopping and preparation.

There is still no guarantee on anything from one day to the next. Although using familiar foods and letting them "help" increases the odds of success, we have prepared foods in which they know all the ingredients but insist that together, today at least, they are not edible.

At the same time, sometimes some totally unlikely food will be snatched up and devoured. E1, for example, loves onions with no real rhyme or reason. Raw or in the form of onion rings, which she once declared "the best food ever."

I can hardly wait until E3, who so far resists anything beyond milk, enters the fray. Hopefully by then I'll have a repertoire to enable me to feed them without totally losing my mind.