I’m outside on my patio, cleaning up after the day’s fun, when I catch a glimpse of my daughter in the corner of my eye. I stop my day’s chores to watch her, spinning alone in the living room with a puppy and a monkey tied to an old string. She twirls and dances with her friends, oblivious to the fact that I’m watching her, absorbed in her own little world. Her face is full of wide eyed wonder as she watches the universe go zooming around her, and my heart is filled with admiration at this child that I too often fail to see for what she is…one child, a singular person, a creature of earth and of me and of God.

She moves uninterrupted in front of the tv screen, around the laundry basket, beside the couch, dancing to her own rhythm in a space that has opened up for her. No one is telling her to ohmygodmoveyouareblockingthemovie, no one is snatching the toys out of her hand because they’re not hers, no one is doing anything and she is wallowing in the silence. Her brothers have gone on vacation with their grandmother, and for the first time in her life, she isn’t the third child…she is the only child.

Our family has never had an only child. Our second baby came on the heels of our first baby; the only way I’ve ever seen my children is through each other’s eyes, and that is the most glorious way to come to know a person, by how they are perceived by the people who love them. Tonight, however, I watch her though the window, fancy and free, uninhibited and unrestrained, and I ache in my heart with the knowing that this child, raw and wild, is here every moment of the day, waiting for her moment to shine through.

The space she occupies is a vacuum that draws everything into it, helpless to resist her tiny little charms. The energy in the room yields for her, the air parts to make way for her dance, the dust that has settled into the crevices of our life joins her in raucous celebration of nothing. The void that is created by the absence of her brothers is merely her personal challenge to fill with grandeur and delight and unmitigated beauty. For two weeks, she will own her surrounds. She will know what is it that she can be when given the space, and I will bear witness to it from afar.

There is a difference between my children and my child. The difference lies in the way her blond curls bounce with the pounding of her feet, the way her waist bends when she has all the room in the world to spin it. The difference lies in the quiet moments they spend in their life apart from each other, allowed to find their own, unencumbered rhythm without scrutiny or consequence. The difference lies in the space they are given to spread their arms and just spin. The difference lies in their singularity, multiplied.

Each one of my children is also my child, unique to themselves. I can’t imagine my life without all three of them, and I can’t imagine their lives without each other. Having a family with three children is gloriously complicated and intricately unrelenting, and as I steal this private moment she’s having in the rarest of moments when no one is watching her, in the fragment of time when she is completely free, I am awe-struck by the simplicity of her perfection.

My daughter, on occasion, does a little modeling. By modeling, I mean that she puts on a cute outfit sent to her by my friends that own a preemie and kids boutique online, she gets her hair brushed, and we go do something fun while I shove a camera in her face.

Truth is, this isn’t unlike most days, except the “fun” is normally the “grocery store”. Well, that and the hair brushing. I try to pick my battles.

I have ridiculously cute children, and I won’t for a second play all modest like I don’t think they are the most amazingly, heart-stoppingly beautiful things to ever grace this planet. I’ve often toyed with the idea of getting them into actual, real modeling, and I’ve gone so far as to ask a friend who knows about this stuff for advice on how to do it. But the thing is, I’m lazy. And I think my kids should get to be, too. And I worry about making them self-conscious about their looks, especially on the cusp of the ugly years.

No child goes through puberty gracefully. Fact. Why do you think the bible stops at Jesus’ adolescence and picks back up in his 30′s? Zits and oddly dispersed facial hair; no one is immune. Not even someone who thinks they’re god.

So for now, I stick with the modeling that helps my friends out, that gets my daughter some stupidly cute outfits, and that lets me dabble in the one and only field of subjects that I am capable of taking decent pictures of. I’m no Secret Agent Mama, but I can take a mean picture of my kids when I have to.

Except when I screw my camera’s setting up.

A new dress arrived last week for 3of3 to trounce around in, and this time we actually prepped for some cuteness. I harnessed my inner pageant-mom and subjected my daughter to unspeakable tortures in the name of fashion.

But it’s not like I’m asking her to do anything I wouldn’t do myself, so there’s that.

And once she was all poofy, we went out. Normally, I have ridiculously good luck with her pictures. They just fall into place, even when I’m using a point and click camera.

Not this time. This time I took 250 pictures and she fed every duck south west of the Mississippi, even the dead one, which didn’t bother her at all but bothered me a great big fat deal, and not one picture is usable. Because I never read the manual for my camera. I assumed the DSLR just ran on pride or something.

So now I get to learn how to fix whatever settings I’ve wacked out on my camera, and then we get to go feed more aminals today. Live ones, preferably. And though there aren’t any pictures good enough for my buddy’s spring campaign, with enough time and Picnik, there are a hell of a lot of pictures for her baby book.

This blog is her so totally her baby book. Shut up; you do it, too.

When my boys were little, I could get them to do just about anything, so long as it meant they’d get to grow up because of it. “Momma, why do I have to take a baff?” So your skin can be clean and stretchy for it to grow, of course. “Momma, do I have to eat dis broccowee?” Only if you want your muscles to be strong so you can grow up big and tall, silly boy. “Momma, I don’t want to sweep!” Well, if you don’t sleep, your body can’t grow. Little boys can only grow while they sleep. You want to grow, right? All they wanted to do was grow-grow-grow. They wanted to be big like their daddy, like each other. They wanted to do big boy things like play video games and go to school and ride bikes outside.

Not so much with my daughter.

I so much as mention growing up and the waterworks begin. “I don’t want to gwow up, Momma! I want to stay wittowl forever!” she cries. And it’s not just pissy little defiant four year old tears, either. The kid is flat out afraid of growing up. I have no idea where this comes from.

I’ve tried to rationalize this with her. I’ve pointed out that she’s already a big girl; she pees on the potty and she rides a bike and puts on her own shoes and eats ice cream cones. Babies don’t do those things. She drinks milk from a cup, not boobies. She has a big girl bed, not a crib. She writes her name and plays on the computer. She’s already big, I tell her, and she just cries and cries and tells me no, she won’t grow up. She’s going to stay wittowl.  She can’t grow up.

Now I know where Peter Pan came from.

I’ve kind of given up on the whole thing and just accepted that I’m going to have to resort to “Show momma how the piggies eat” to get her to eat her vegetables, or worse, the “Pull it out of her belly-button” game which is really fun when they eat mini-marshmallows but not at all fun when they eat mashed potatoes. The fact of the matter is that this is the last kid I get, and I wouldn’t mind it in the least if she stayed little. She got big way too fast as it is, really.

Except that she really wants to go to school. Except that I really want her to go to school. Except that my husband would like to see his floor and my boss would like to see that report and I need her to be elsewhere if I’m going to get those things done.

Last time we tried school, she was two and not at all ready and cried from drop off to pick up every time we left her there. We ended up pulling her out because I just didn’t feel like paying someone to make my kid cry. We haven’t tried since, but Tuesday is supposed to be her first day at pre-school here. And she’s very excited. She asks me all the time what she’ll be doing and brags that she’s going to have a teacher and homework, just like the guys. She tells me that she won’t cry at school this time, which, holy memory Batman, and I say to her that of course she won’t, because she’s a big girl now, and I hold my breath.

And she looks at me with those big, green eyes that are starting to well up with tears, and she thinks. She thinks really hard and says, “No momma, I’m a big BOY now. I’m your son. Big son-boys go to school.” And I think I have a really clever little girl.

I wait until it’s too late to take my kids to the doctor. I have an 11 year old with asthma because I listened to the doctor who said he had a cold and didn’t start ignoring the doctor until the pneumonia had almost fixed itself and his lungs had almost said, “Fine, do it yourself.”

We did it ourselves for a week in Children’s Hospital to get his pulse-ox above 80. We’ll be doing it ourselves for the rest of his life, with the assistance of steroidal inhalants.

I under-react or I over-react, medically. Usually, one directly follows the other. Like the time I, oh yes I did, apologized to the mother of the girl who’s feet hit my 2 year old’s face at full-speed on a gymnastics center swing and threw her 20 feet across the gym floor. I actually checked on that girl to make sure she was okay before I realized, “Hey, my child is no longer conscious.” Then I lost my fucking mind and cried sososo hard that we waited for exactly 3.2 seconds in a Canadian emergency room to be seen. They sent two doctors…one for her, one for me.

I wish I was kidding.

However, when it comes to blood and bones and oxygen, I don’t fuck around. You bleed? You visit the ER. You wheeze? We go to the ER. You break? I take a quick pregnancy test because you and me are about to spend some time under an x-ray machine. Even if it’s your eye socket and even I know there isn’t a cast in the world for a broken eye socket.

So my daughter has been sick since Christmas Eve. My mother in law has been, too. They’ve been boogie-nosed, fever burning, cold-sweating, sleeping all day, up all night petri-dishes. My mother in law said her lungs felt like dried up coal. My daughter said her ears were screaming at her. But they did it together, at the same time, and that screams of virus. I don’t go to the doctor for viruses. I also don’t pay people to tell me I have blue eyes or blond hair. I can see that for myself, thanks, and I have plenty of other things I’d like to waste $20 on.

Fevers don’t scare me, either. Once you have a kid who bottoms out a thermometer so many times his doctor tells you to stop bringing him in every time he does it, you giggle off 103. Because you know how to treat it. I KNOW how to treat a fever. It’s my superpower; that and stain removal.

But after a good week, week and a half, of fevers and no sleep and sneezing and coughing that just kept getting worse, I started to worry. One girl is 4, one is 68, and neither are strong enough to endure something like, oh, say, the swine flu.

And that’s when I realized that I’d been ignoring the swine flu in a child and an elderly woman with asthma. All of the symptoms were right there in front of me…fever, cough, sore throat, runny or stuffy nose, body aches, headache, chills and fatigue. We won’t discuss the diarrhea.

My daughter started waking up in the middle of the night on fucking FIRE and twitching in my arms. Twitching, people. My mother in law started sleeping so late into the day, I started sending her son to poke her and make sure she was still alive. When death became a symptom we were actively checking for, I made them go to the doctor.

I walked into the ER and said I KNEW they both had the swine flu and they were dying and please save them from my reckless endangerment. They each were examined thoroughly and I was reminded that when a child tells you her ears are screaming at her, she typically has an infection. IN HER EARS. And my mother in law? Bronchitis. My first clue would have been that the place where her BRONCHIAL TUBES live felt dried up.

This was exactly as embarrassing as that time I ran my child to the ER at 3 in the morning because I KNEW she was asphyxiating and they KNEW she had the croup. Which, yeah….I’d effectively treated numerous times using only a shower and the agreeable Colorado nighttime air for over a decade with my boys. AND I’ve read Anne of Green Gables, like, a bazillion times.

They bill you three thousand dollars to sit in an ER overnight and watch Ed, Edd and Eddie re-runs with a one year old. Just sayin’.

Children hate Santa. It’s true.

Never once has a child under four sat in his lap of their own volition. Never has a child over the age of 8 sat in his lap and been completely sold on the idea. Santa has a very small margin for error in his job.

Children like Santa the way Tiger Woods likes being married….in theory. The idea is nice, but the practical application is just creepy. He smells like dusty beer and cheese and dirty diapers. He takes your order and then makes you wait forever to bring it to you. Santa is the all-night-breakfast diner in the skanky part of town with the 5 hour wait for stale pancakes that you, and every other under-dressed drunk person in your metropolitan area, only go to after 17 shots of Jager at some club you’re entirely too old to be at anyway.

I took my kids to that diner last night.

I had to carefully negotiate this event with my oldest. He doesn’t want to believe, but after the events of last year, he’s pretty sure he has some solidly empirical proof. I had to show him every picture we’ve ever had with Santa, the ones I keep all in one frame, and point out that he is the only child in all 11 pictures. I had to puppy-dog eye him and remind him that this is the only picture I get every year with all of my babies, and that I realize he knows it isn’t the real Santa, but a big fat weird elf, like Buddy only not as awesome, but maybe he could just do me this one solid and I’d make sure the real Santa heard about his kindness and charitable actions towards his mother?

I also reminded him that his sister finally gets it, and it’s our job as a family to keep this going. To make her believe that the guy in his brother’s school right now is the real Santa, so that she can have the magic he and his brother had when they were her age.

Pulling the ‘magic of childhood’ card on that kid works Every. Fucking. Time. He even smiled for the picture. Kind of.

My 9 year old was ALL ABOUT IT, because he is ALL ABOUT EVERYTHING ALL OF THE GODDAMN TIME. Except homework. Fuck homework. He, of course, spent the better part of the evening repeatedly asking me if I believed in Santa, hoping to trip me up and get me to admit the truth. I know he knows. I also know that he’s entirely too smart to ever admit that he knows. I’m a cheap bastard, and he wants a iPod touch someday. He knows it’s Santa or bust around here.

He actually said to me, “I’m asking for DJ Hero and an iPod touch, and if I don’t get them, I’ll know that Santa isn’t real.” I guess I have 14 more days of him believing, then, because there’s no way in hell. NO WAY.

3of3 immediately shit rainbows and glitter when I told her Santa was at her brother’s school. “Santa is my fayborite! He’s my bestest fwiend in da whole woiald!” (That’s world. She’s an 80 year old jewish woman from Brooklyn.) She even let me brush her hair before we left.

We stood in line for 18 hours, and we weren’t even drunk so it wasn’t any fun. She kept peeking around the corner, “Dayr he is, momma! Dayr’s Santa!” We practiced talking to him. “What do you say to Santa first?”, I asked them. “Hi Santa, how was your day?” they all replied. “And what are you asking him for?” “Dora skates and flagnard!” “What about that pink DS you’ve wanted? You can ask for that, too, you know.” “No, I only ask for one fing, momma. I ask for DORA SKATES AND FLAGNARD.” So, she can’t count, enunciate or negotiate. Good thing she’s got looks to ride through life on.

Also, what the fuck is flagnard? Anyone?

We watched bazillions of babies sit on his lap and cry. We giggle at the silliness of them all. And then it was her turn. Oh, how fickle the heart of a young girl can be.

She clawed my eyeballs out when I tried to sit her on his lap. She hyperventilated when I walked away. She buried her face into her brother’s shoulder and refused to smile for a picture. I made a complete ass of myself and embarrassed the shit out of her, so in a few days, I’ll be getting my $7 5X7 stale pancake with one very eager face smiling back at me and two faces full of abject humiliation and disgust at their fool of a mother and the fact that she made them do this ridiculous shit.

But Santa gave her a candy cane, so they were all good by the end. She even told him what she wanted. He looked at me and said, “Flagnard?” and I shrugged. He said, “iPod?” and I said, “You can expect a call from his father telling you he can’t have one of those until he’s gainfully employed.” And then we hugged him goodbye, even the 11 year old whom Santa managed to get, not just a smile but a full on belly laugh out of, and there’s your Christmas magic, folks, and with that we were off.

I tucked her into bed later and she said, “Momma, I can’t wike Santa” and I asked her why. She said, “Dat’s not the weawl Santa, mawwwm” and I asked her how she knew. She said, “He has cwouds all over his face.” I tried to explain what a beard is, that daddy has a little brown one and Santa has a big white one, but she said no. “No, momma, day were cwouds, and I don’t wike cwouds on faces.”

And I don’t like trying to figure out what Flagnard is, so I guess we’re even.