I am the reluctant mama of a tweener.

The Princess is piling all her stuff on the moving truck to leave girlhood, but it’s a long, hard drive before she is all grown up. Most days I feel like the asphalt. In the space of a day she will play with Polly Pockets, irritate her brother to tears, and then holler at me that I don’t understand her and never listen.

She has yet to be too interested in fashion or boys. She is still looking for the day when cloaks and gowns and empire waists come back in style, and her crushes are firmly fixed on Prince Caspian and Aragorn. It sure beats Hot Topic and sparkly vampires.

From the time she was able to hold a board book, she has been a bibliophile and remains largely unaware of the world around her. If the Bear got three wishes from a genie, he would wish for a gazillion more wishes, but she only wants an unlimited selection of books, shelves to put them on, and an addition to the house to put the shelves in. A girl of simple tastes! I love that, whatever else we have struggled with all day, no matter how much animosity is in the air, we can curl up at night and read together and things smooth out. We will always have books, my dear.

She is practical. She is methodical. She is rigid. And if you don’t do things in the prescribed order or in the way you said you would, she will …have a talk  with you about it. And you will be wrong. And it doesn’t matter if you are 55 years old and a PhD, you will still be wrong. Oh, and by the way: you’re wrong. (This can be a problem when it comes to math corrections.)

She is beginning to look for an older girl to peer back at her from the mirror.

Shhhh…don’t tell her, but I can see that girl peeking out from behind the cat’s eye glasses and tumbleweedy hair. And I am steeling myself for the day when she taps me on the shoulder and says, “Boo!”

Happy Birthday, Princess.

As in, Do you wanna drink? Do you wanna potty?

I hate potty training. In fact, I would gladly go through labor and delivery – which I do drug free, by the way – all over again if it meant I could skip it entirely. Maybe twice.

I hate the waiting. I dislike persuasion. I shudder at the potty tour phase, when you can’t go anywhere without your child wanting to pee in every public restroom at every store you enter. And don’t get me started about the M&Ms. Chocolate will never be the same for me.

Because of years of violent diaper rash, we all figured that Moo would enthusiastically embrace the potty. But no. Poo is evil and she hates to go, period. Not in a house, not with a mouse, not on the pot, it’s a bad spot! What’s more, everyone is urging her on and her feline little self is inclined to do just the opposite. For the first kid, wanting to be like the big kids in the books was the trick. For our second born, it was cold, hard cash. But so help me, I can not find Moo’s motivation and I am starting to lose my cool.

I am normally pretty laid back about the potty thing, if only because diapers are pretty durned convenient and I know that no one has chosen to wear them up through high school. When they are ready, fine, but I am not going to waste my life camping out in the bathroom if they are not going to hurry up and go. But holy guacamole, she has ZERO inclination to even keep her pants dry. And at nearly three years old, she is going to have to start wearing Depends.

In the meantime, I will be chanting, “She won’t be in diapers when she gets her driver’s licence, please, God, she won’t be in diapers when she gets her driver’s licence…”

One evening, as I walked by Mr. MG, munchies in hand,  while he wiped out Mech bad guys on the computer:

Me: Iz in yur pantry, stealin all yur snax.

Mr. MG (Without taking his eyes from the screen): Nom, nom, nom.

He gets me.

At the risk of this poor, neglected blog becoming all-remodel-whining-all-the-time, I am going to post about The Project again.

Because it is done!

Six days ago, we moved the furniture back up and set it on the freshly cleaned carpets. Mr. MG rewired and installed a new fixture in the stairwell. And about half the boxes are hauled in, ready to be unpacked whenever there is a spare minute. It has been strange but wonderful to sleep in a real bed again, instead of the futon in the living room. I don’t have to hike through cat gates, miles of plastic sheeting and debris with a flashlight every time I want to take a shower. And we eat at a real table, facing each other like semi-civilized human beings, instead of lined up cheek-by-jowl at the breakfast bar.

It felt sad and strange at first to put the kids to bed upstairs. I had gotten sort of used to having them right in the next room all the time, and I still creep around quietly in the evenings as if they are still there and I might wake them. The Bear and Moo are still not convinced the upstairs is better – in fact the Bear has said repeatedly that he misses the way it was. He is the only one who has a room alone, after all.

So, this is how we have lived for three months:

This is the first thing you’d see when you walked in the front door. It was not only a classy way to greet guests, it was also a good way to scare away stray neighbor kids.

In comparison, the dining room kids’ room was pretty attractive. Except for the fact that the Bear’s loft bed isn’t really meant to have a full bed with box springs beneath it, so the Princess routinely bonked her head, setting off the Bear’s hair-trigger whining mechanism, which would in turn trip her sarcasm emitter. Fun times. Also, Moo is a night owl and likes to throw crib parties until the wee hours, keping everyone awake so they are at their perky best for school in the morning.

You’ve already been shown to the Gates of Hell.

Our sleeping area – the living room – was the one place I didn’t photograph, which is funny since it was the main gathering spot for one and all. Our futon was the wrestling arena, the TV-watching pad, the reading room, and the snuggle nest. All three kids would cease fire and lie all over each other. It wasn’t great for entertaining company, but a bedroom in the living room was fabulous for bonding with the hooligans.

Next up: before and after pics. sort of.

Because I am down for the count with a nasty cold and am also in the middle of moving stuff (yay!), this will not be a very wordy post. But I have to put up the pictures of this year’s Halloween costumes. They came out so well! (The costumes, that is… the pictures, not so much. With all the excitement of the evening, it is hard to insist on finding good light and posing properly. I am no Miz Booshay.)

Usually the year they are two is the last age I get to dictate a cool costume. But Moo broke the mold and insisted on being Snoopy. Naturally, Mr. MG escorted her as Charlie Brown.

The Bear is still superhero crazy and wanted to be Wolverine. I am pretty smooth on creating anything out of sweats, but this time he stumped me. It’s the first time any of us has worn a store-bought costume. He felt very fierce!

I totally stole an idea from a friend of a friend, but since that person was a total stranger to me and lived in another state, I figured it was fair game. I was a ceiling fan, and nobody got the joke.

The Princess was the best of the bunch, though. She was Arwen from The Lord of the Rings trilogy (“The book, not the movies.”) and my awesome mother in law made her gown and cloak from scratch. (She did Mr. MG’s and Moo’s costumes as well. And the Bears claws. She pretty much rules.) She looked just gorgeous. The pictures don’t really do it justice.

All in all, totally worth dosing up with loads of cold medicine and wandering around in the windy Northwest weather, scrounging for candy.