My four-year-old, Everett, is stubborn. Not just stubborn in the sense of, I'll wear my Batman sweatshirt with the wings to your holiday party and there's nothing you can do about it! No, that's our friend's son, Jackson.

Everett is stubborn in ways mysterious and irrational, bold and dramatic. Everett is stubborn for hours on end. He'll refuse to put his pajama pants on the night before I'm about to leave for a business trip (causing an hour of screaming and punishments, keeping him up 'til 11 and me guilty as I kiss him goodbye at 5:30 a.m.), he'll not say "please" can he switch chairs with me (which I would have happily done, letting him sit on the "fun" seat in my office to do crafts). He'll go hungry all night rather than eat two more bites of his grilled cheese sandwich so he can have yogurt, juice, cinnamon toast, whatever is his current infatuation.

He's stubborn, but he's also charming and friendly to all, social, thoughtful, full of fantasy and deep human insights.

In short, he's a four-year-old male version of me.

I clicked on someone's blog tonight, a mom who lives near me. She was feeling mom-ed out, ready to re-realize herself as not just a mommy blogger. I respect her and love her and even relate to where she is as a mom but: not me.

A few clicks later I found an email from Niki Alvey, my Blogging Baby companion from way back. She pointed me to a comment someone had left saying they missed me! And I just had to write, because, let me tell you: I am all about the mommy blogging. It's appearing all over my brain but not often translating into my fingers. And because I miss y'all too. So tonight begins Postcards from four years old.

Everett's four years old now; he was just turning two when I first started writing for Blogging Baby. I feel like such an "old" mama that, when I visited my friend Shetha in the hospital last weekend, I was almost afraid to walk through the doors of the maternity ward. It was hallowed ground, filled with a mystical sense of birthing power and untrammeled newness that I hadn't felt for, oh, almost 18 months. Maybe that's a short time to you, but let's remember I've only held one job -- in my life -- longer than 16 months. I've now been a mama for longer than I've ever done any one thing. I had to put that in bold because it was just that stunning to me.

Nonetheless I held her tiny, sweet baby, looking so much like Truman when he was a tiny newborn, and declared myself ready to get pregnant again.

I've been mightily tested in my role as mama lately.

I just returned from a fun errand with Truman in the bike trailer. We hung out downtown, where everyone commented on his happy perfection. A man heading to his smoke break helped me park the trailer, which wanted to poke out into the truck loading zone. At the yarn store, the other customers exclaimed over his smiley cuteness. Next door, where we wandered through rainbow (no, better than rainbow, kaleidoscope or 1000-pack Crayola) walls of embroidery floss, the owner's little dog sniffed and licked him.

All this, was fun, and I continued to enjoy the smiles from other bikers when we pulled up to stop lights. In order to cross a busy street on the way home, I pulled the trailer with the now-sleeping baby to a crosswalk, in front of a coffee shop. A man sat in one of the sidewalk tables and started commenting on my now-sleeping baby.

"A late night, or an early morning?" he asked, bizarrely. It was 3 p.m.

"Umm, just naptime," I responded.

"How old?"

I very faithfully kept Everett's baby book, filling in most of the pages before he was even born. After he hit about age one, I 'completed' it in a mad rush and let the blogging take over.

Truman's baby book never got beyond the design phase, and I think part of the problem is that the milestones that matter to me? Don't really even fit in the pages of those mass-market baby books. If they did, I would have been scribbling in a lot of the blanks on my boys' books in the past few days.

• Truman, August 9, 15.5 months: Baby's first on the floor, kicking and screaming tantrum
• Everett, August 10, 4 years: First appropriate use of the word "bitch" and subsequent heartfelt apology
• Truman, August 12: Baby's first climb to the top of a 1940s, highly scary play structure
• Everett, July 30: First time in the deep end, "walking" around the edge of the pool with his hands
• Everett, August 12: First time using aggression to protect his little brother from another kid

I watch these milestones with amusement, fear, and a few of the choked-up I-can't-believe-my-little-boy-is-growing-up-so-fast sniffles. I'll never remember when Everett got his molars or what day it was when Truman first waved goodbye. But I will remember Everett telling Truman that he was a superhero, too; I'll remember Truman going down that really, really scary slide with a wide-open-mouthed grin; I'll remember how Everett learned to take his seatbelt off, but waited until the car was stopped to do it, all on his own.

My oldest son, Everett, will be four in two weeks. And already I feel I've had a dozen years of parenting experience. He's just his own person: vibrant, funny, dramatic, tortured. He has a hundred fears and a thousand ways of dealing with them. He's always battling wills with me, with his dad, with his 14-month-old brother, Truman.

He even has a speech affectation.

For the past month or so, Everett has been changing the sound "ff" at the end of words to "ss." That gives us "stuss," "oss," "myselss." Hilariously, "sase" instead of "safe" (I thought, sadly, how he'd never know that stands for "self-addressed stamped envelope"), and today while we were making a fabric toy: "stussing."

At first I asked him about it. When it became obvious that he wasn't going to discuss his affectation, and I realized that it was a choice -- often he'd use the same word two ways in one sentence ("can you help me take my shirt off, it needs to be oss!") -- I realized that it was best to leave it alone.

 

I keenly remember December 2005. It was the first Christmas for my second son, Truman. I got a new lens for my camera. And I spent the entire month with boiling blood thanks to Linda Hirshman's article telling me -- us -- that women who stayed home with their children, who had more than one child, were perverting the goals of feminism. Her thesis: if you get educated, and then fail to have a job that matters (and to Hirshman, only well-paying professional jobs, or positions in academia, matter -- working for non-profits is almost as much of a waste of an Ivy League BA as is changing diapers), you're killing feminism, you're destroying everything for which those 50s and 60s-era leaders worked.

You all, your blood boiled, too. You wrote in comment after comment, over 50 of you. Many of you responded to my survey with long, honest, heart-wrenching, eloquent pieces. You made me cry. You made me laugh. And you may have even raised my blood temperature to, like, 214 degrees. I was hot.

Thank you, Linda, for bringing back December 2005 to me with startling heat. You published your book, and ABC (damn you ABC!) published an excerpt. You must have known, ABC, that I was reading. You must have known that quoting Blogging Baby interviews would make me link to you. Scourge of the earth.

And I have to. I must defend your honor, our honor. I must defend the feminist "elite," I must refute Linda's assertions. She says (horrors) that our stories prove the correctness of her thesis. That made me so mad, I had to bold it.

Yesterday, I spent the afternoon (and, as it turned out, evening) at my parent's home near the Oregon coast. The little "town" they live in, Elsie, is just close enough so that they share a zip code with the oceanside towns, and just far enough so that the land they live on is extremely cheap. They're one of the only "real" houses on their ill-kept lane peppered with mobile homes and old cars.

One neighbor in particular is acknowledged by the locals to be a meth addict and occasional dealer. And he has a dog.

My parents have known the dog, a German Shepherd mix, since he was a puppy. His name, ironically, is "MacGruff" and every appearance indicates his owner bought him as protection. He's usually tied up with a huge, almost cartoonish chain that still frequently comes loose, and MacGruff will run through the once-idyllic area, dragging his heavy chain behind him. My mom said she'd never worried about MacGruff, but often thought his chain might one day give someone a broken hip, or collarbone, or leg.

My entire extended family was there, save my sister-in-law Destiny and her daughter. Destiny was acting as doula for a neighbor, who was a week past her due date. We'd finished lunch -- trout, chicken, rootbeer floats -- and several of the dads being honored, on this day of theirs, had just begun walking toward the river to catch crawfish. When MacGruff went crazy.

Someone, in the past few months, told me, "breastfeeding is a part-time job." And as I've crossed the line from "baby" to "toddler" with Truman, passed the all-important first birthday and found myself re-committing to the various non-profits and extracurriculars that occupy my time when I'm not working for my "day" job ... I've started to wonder: am I violating some part of my employment agreement here?

Truman, like his brother Everett before him, is a night feeder. I turned to co-sleeping as a crutch when the boys were still tiny infants, and I'm still rolling over at 2 a.m., 5 a.m., 6 a.m., 7 a.m. to feed Truman. We usually finish up our last feeding around 7:45 and I fight for that last few minutes of sleep before I hit my computer. Often, I find myself stealing time "away" from work to catch up on my sporadic sleep.

Instead of a lunch break, I take a breastfeeding break, sometime between 11 and 1, after which my energy is sapped and I long to join Truman in his daily nap. Later, I'll give him his bedtime feeding. Before baby, I'd return to my laptop around 9 or 10 p.m., raring to go for a latenight writing jag. Now? I'm lucky if I can keep my eyes open as long as Truman does. I'm losing four or more hours of "productivity" a day thanks to the endless (but nutritive!) sucking.

My 13-month-old, Truman, is fast. He's been walking less than two months, but he dove into the mobility thing as if he was training for the Olympic 10-meter event. He'll dart from place to place in the blink of an eye. And I'm just not ... well, let's just say I'm not a perfect mom.

Because last weekend, I let Truman walk into traffic.

It was Sunday afternoon, and my husband was doing his one-weekend-a-month thing with the Army Reserves. I had a ton of work to do, and felt guilty for keeping the kids cooped up. So, to assuage my feelings of parental inadequacy, I let them play in the front yard while I worked on my laptop. Everett was hilariously playing man-to-man defense, making sure Truman didn't get too close to the busy street only a few feet from our little picket fence. And I was watching, I mean, I was only four or five steps away from the boys.

And then, suddenly, Everett had to pee and ran to the side of the porch (I've taught him not to drop drawers in the middle of the front yard, aren't I a good mom?). In the few seconds it took me to turn my head and see what Everett was doing, Truman ran for it. By the time I looked back at him, he had taken one step into the street.

Bed Rest: A Novel, by Sarah Bilston, is better than I Don't Know How She Does It. Better than The Nanny Diaries. Better than Little Earthquakes. And most of all, better than being on bed rest.

I was an English literature major at a serious liberal arts college, so I'm a bit of a literature snob. I read books like the aforementioned I Don't Know How She Does It, enjoying bits and pieces but dripping with guilt over their lack of literary heft and picking out all the flaws despite myself. When I opened a padded envelope and saw the uncreatively-titled Bed Rest, sent to me by a publicist for review, I immediately pooh-poohed its bold, blue-and-pink graphics and the cover reviews, obviously positioning it against the lightweights of Brit-centric chick lit. It was a week or so before I picked it up to read the first chapter.

Instantly, I was hooked, and ended up finishing the novel in a few days, forsaking both work and crafty pursuits (and, if you want to know the truth, my own children) in my guiltless addiction. What Plum Sykes said about this being great even if you haven't been pregnant? I think it's true. The beauty of Bed Rest is that it's not just mommy lit, and yet (at the same time) it's so true to the experience of pregnant moms.

My husband returned home tonight after two weeks of Army Reserve duty. And although it wasn't the first time he'd left me alone with my children, it was the first time since I had one baby on the outside and a full-time, all-the-time, work-from-home job. I have a babysitter 12 hours a week, but what usually seems like a luxury was laughably inadequate.

In the hours leading up to his arrival (a few hours later than scheduled thanks to an I-5 traffic jam), much though I missed him and his wonderful sweet husband-ness, all that I could think was how much I wanted to meet him at the door with my laptop all packed up and a few dollars for a beer, and run as fast as I could to the nearest WiFi spot without the kids. Or him.

Everett insisted that I watch him flip through the extras on the Monsters, Inc. DVD, or talk for one of his action figures; Truman was into everything and knocked over my coffee, my late lunch of pasta, my glasses, an entire drawer full of crayons and chalk (for the eighth time), a basket full of photo CDs that I'd just organized by date; and neither of them could keep their hands off me! I was just trying to focus for 10, 20 minutes on something. And not. Doing. So.

Last night, I must admit, I lost it a bit with my boys. They're both doing this screaming thing now, to get what they want, and I just wanted a few moments alone! I tore my hair and then settled them both down for bed so I could have an hour or two of peace. It didn't last long. All night long, as we tossed and turned together (Truman co-sleeps and Everett always crawls into bed with me somewhere around 3 a.m.), I wondered when I'd be able to just sleep alone.

And then today I hung out with Larissa at the "Alberta Art Hop." We were selling our latest lark, bonnets and baby carriers and tees and onesies and what I'm calling "teething birds" made with vintage and recycled fabrics. Naturally, it being a nice day in Portland's baby central, we saw dozens of pregnant bellies and an equal measure of tiny newborns.

And oh, how I wanted to feel that feeling once again, that sleepy eye-rubbing newness, that falling-in-love, the time when every breath is full of the wonder of brand-new life. I wanted a baby again, a tiny mewling hand-clenching newborn.

I wasn't the only one. Larissa joined in my wishes, although if you want to know the truth neither of us ran home and checked our ovulation calendars or anything. Maybe I won't be trying to get pregnant in the next weeks or even in the next year. But oh, I want. I want.

[Photo Larissa Brown, teething bird Barbara my own. In Portland? We'll be 'round 29th & Alberta tomorrow.]

Truman turned one year old on Friday, and I've just gotten to the computer to focus on him. Despite his overwhelming sweetness and perfection, the poor kid, he just does not get as much attention as his older brother.

For Truman's first birthday, there were no themed invitations, few outside-the-family guests, no presents from mom & dad, not even a big #1 candle. I forgot the candles entirely, in fact, so busied myself photographing him stuffing delicious cupcakes in his mouth.

He's such an amazing boy, and so different from his older brother. Where Everett is light and bright, Truman is dark and serious; where Everett is zany and dramatic, Truman is calm and focused; where Everett shunned the large variety of foods offered him for favorites, Truman happily eats everything he can fit in his mouth. They're equally smart and flirty but Truman has this soulful stare that melts everyone with whom he makes eye contact, whereas Everett is in-your-face silly and sweet but never soulful.

Truman, whose first birthday is tomorrow, has begun to distinguish himself as a true chocolate freak. It was our anniversary yesterday, and given that I had an entire category of blogs launching first thing in the morning, my husband celebrated by buying several chocolate bars and handing them to me bit-by-bit as I furiously emailed, IM-ed and blogged.

For Truman, it was like a baby scavenger hunt where every treasure is yummy and deserving of pressing into his slobbery maw. Got chocolate? Truman will make you feel as if you are the only one who can save him from certain sweet starvation. I found him today scaling his high chair. His mission? A few squares of leftover chocolate. I could open a bar two rooms away and in seconds Truman would come toddling toward me, grabbing onto my leg and using every bit of strength to drag himself up to the milky cocoa-liciousness.

I can't blame him but his passion and focus are overwhelming. He'll go through any amount of struggle or discomfort for chocolate. I only hope he's as smart as he is sweet-toothed so I can teach him not to follow any manner of Pied Piper bearing a Hershey's bar. I keep wondering how much chocolate is too much for a baby. For Truman? I think the daily limit is somewhere between a couple of candy bars and a double-wide box of truffles.

"You want to get me in the mood? Help out!" says one mom I know.

"Watching my hubby cheerfully, without my prodding, take care of household duties totally puts me in the mood," says another.


Why is this? It's certainly not that male domesticity is dreamy -- you'll never find me, or any of my mama friends, watching videos of scantily-clad men putting plates and bowls in the dishwasher and tucking the kids in bed. Scrubbing toilets isn't fun no matter who's doing it. It's not the work in and of itself. It's the helping. And it's the fact that you don't have to do it all yourself. It's the fact that you don't have to do it all yourself. And perhaps most importantly, it's about recognizing and appreciating your partner's hard work. That alone is a powerful aphrodisiac.

When you first partner with the man of your dreams, it seems easy -- or, at least, possible -- to separate your wifely self from that of career woman, sporty gal, best friend, craft maven. As a wise woman told me recently, “before I was a mom I was Ghandi: I was generous with my time and resources. If my husband wanted to go on a hike, that was great!” But after… every half-hour had to be portioned out, with a responsible parent “on duty” at any given time. Once I became a mom, my identities were no longer separate and certainly not equal: I was mom first and foremost, and 24 hours a day. Suddenly my partnership with my husband was that of boss and executive assistant. And that’s just not sexy.

In order to get in the mood, I had to step out of my mom role. In the first months of a child’s life, that’s nearly impossible; and for the rest of toddler-hood it’s just really, really hard. So when I read Lainie Keslin Ettinger’s essay in the New York Times (she’s the wise woman of whom I spoke), I thought, yes! Someone understands exactly what I’m going through.

And I discovered that, for moms, porn is not so racy after all.

Want a mom in the mood, men? Try these tips:

1. Put the kids to bed, making an effort to get them to sleep without a fuss.
2. Dinner time? Offer to chop while she sautés.
3. When mom gets home from work and errands, have the baby bathed and freshly diapered.
4. Clear out the answering machine.
5. When dinner's over, show off your high-school waiter skills and carry all the dishes to the kitchen.
6. Send thank-you notes to all your relatives for the gifts they've sent this year.
7. Fold the laundry in the dryer and put it away.
8. Talk about something other than discipline or chores or bills.
9. Take the kids to the park (or anywhere, for that matter!) so mom can have a break.
10. If you're unsure how to help, by all means, ask.

Update: lots of you have commented to say, "this article is outdated!" and, "my husband helps around the house" or, (for you dads), "I help! I do!" and to that I say, I know. I know that many of you help. These dads pictured here? They help. And the more they do, the more their busy, next-millennium, working wives feel intimate, sexy, valued.

Just because some of you do help doesn't mean that it's any less desired. Just because some women don't value that help doesn't mean it's not true for me, for my very fashionable and well-educated friends. We love our husbands and yet we rarely have time to separate ourselves from the day-to-day of mom, career, mom, friend, mom, household finance chief, and oh yeah, mom. The more our "partners" are truly partnering, the better we feel about them come nookie time.