Oh my gosh, I have a blog.

That hit me today, when someone mentioned the blog and my immediate reaction was, "Oh, shoot. That thing." I used to post so frequently, several times a week, and now it sits neglected and sad, grateful to be updated once or twice a week.

I still love blogging; it just can't happen as often as it used to. My kids are all mobile, and they are all down to one nap a day. You'd think that two hour window would afford me time to blog and train for marathons and eat bon-bons (all at the same time), but no, I usually end up cleaning or sewing or even collapsing on the bed, desperate for a nap and a break from all The Toddler Energy.

There is so much Toddler Energy up in here. It's palpable. And it tastes like peanut butter.

So. Okay, I guess I don't need to ramble on about not being able to post while I'm in the middle of, you know, a post. I actually wanted to write out a few things about our day simply for posterity's sake. You see, I don't scrapbook. I blog. I write down the things that need to be remembered, then my dear husband has my blog made into hard cover books. It's a lovely thing. So it's okay that I'm writing these dear, sweet things out here instead of in my nonexistent baby books. (Seriously. My children don't have baby books. You can think I'm a bad mom, that's all right. It just means I have fewer things to gather up in the unfortunate event of a fire.)

What I want to remember in the future is just how hilarious J is. He is nearly three now (just five more days!), and he is so very vocal and articulate. He never stops talking. He is always telling me about something, narrating some act of play, telling his siblings what to do, always talking. He has been "always talking" for a while now, but in the last few weeks his speech has gotten really clear while simultaneously becoming more garbled. What I mean is, we can now almost always understand what he is saying, but he doesn't always know what words he needs to express his thoughts, so his sentence structure collapses into something oh-so-toddler. Despite these grammatical collapses, he gets his thoughts across very clearly and forcefully. Combine that with his frank and openly curious personality, and the results are comical, if not often frustrating.

(I should note here that I am not trying to neglect B. This is simply his brother's turn. Rest assured that B is just as articulate; he simply keeps to himself more often.)

So this morning the baby, B, and Mr. Open Curiosity Himself all went on several errands. I knew we 'd be tired and hungry by the end of our stops, but they all needed to be done. Plus I tend to expect a lot out of my kids, and guess what?, they usually deliver by being compliant and helpful. I say "usually" because today was J's day to turn up the Feist.

In Hobby Lobby he upheld himself with dignity and poise, until he saw the wind chimes. He knocked about 40 of them together before I could stop him. When I asked him to stop, he said "No." When I pulled him away from the chimes and started to give him a mini-lecture on obedience, he said, "Shhh. Hush. Be quiet, Mama. Don't talk." (I should note that he said it very kindly and quietly, like maybe if I were feeling generous I would simply allow the gentle soothing tones of his voice help me drift to sleep.) He was, in essence, telling me to shut up, as only sweet J can, so I tapped his mouth quickly (though not hard at all) to let him know he was speaking out of turn.

His response? A loud, "Don't spank my mouth!"

I'm afraid I dropped all pretense of Serious Mama and laughed right out loud.

Spanking his mouth! Ha!

J's morning quickly unraveled from there, and by the end of it, I wasn't laughing. At Target he ran into traffic instead of holding hands, and in Office Max he ran out of two sets of automatic doors and nearly into the street in the few seconds' time it took me to hand my debit card to the cashier. At the post office he threw a full-blown, crying, on the floor temper tantrum, something that I honestly don't know he's ever done before. He's usually so even-keeled, so obedient, and so helpful that the whole morning kind of knocked the wind out of me.

Eventually he napped and then played outside for a long time, so he got his knickers back on straight, so to speak. By the time we as a family were driving home from the library this evening, The Professor and I were laughing at J's earnest backseat renditions "Oh My Sunshine" (You Are My Sunshine), "Mary Had a Little Lamb," and "Old MacDonald." My husband actually said, "And this is the kid you were so exasperated with today?"

Well. He wasn't the one spanking mouths and getting told to hush.