Every year Husband and I sit down to make some goals for the New Year. And, of course, this year was no different, although six boys make it a little hard to have any stretch of uninterrupted time to write out goals and make them look remotely pretty. So if these don’t make a lick of sense, I’m sorry. We’re drowning here, and my life preserver has a hole in it.
1. Stop having homicidal thoughts toward my children.
I’m kidding. Or am I? No, really I am. I don’t ever have homicidal thoughts toward my children. Actually, if I’m being candidly honest, the thoughts that tend to come sometimes are, “I wonder if I could give these two away to that one family member and then just keep the rest.” And the “these two” part changes every day, because the easy ones change every day, too. That’s a lie. “These two” are almost always the twins in the terrible 3s. They’re the most consistent team in my house. But in the new year, I would like to make it my goal to not let any of those I’d-like-to-give-you-away thoughts come. This is a tall order, but the twins will turn 4, and I’ve heard 4 is a turning-around point for kids like them. At least that’s what I hold tight to when another twin catastrophe comes swinging in.
2. Make one meal where no one says, “I don’t like that” before they even taste it.
Maddening. Here I’ve slaved over a damn stove all afternoon, and I put that yummy chicken soup with the ingredients I threw together, because someone ate all the carrots and someone spilled the oregano and someone else was snacking on the chicken while I wasn’t looking, and, also, I’m not the best at planning meals, but still, it took an hour to cook, and before they even taste it, someone says, “Aw, I hate that.” Yeah, well, I hate you right now, too. I’m kidding. Or am I?
3. Never watch another episode of the following shows: Pokemon, Octonauts, SpongeBob SquarePants, (fill in your own blank).
I’ll say what we’re all thinking: Kids’ shows are the worst shows ever. Not only do they have theme songs that will get caught in our brains for a thousand years, but they usually feature a whole slew of children’s voices. I don’t know about you, but I have enough children’s voices in my house trying to get my attention. I don’t need another little-kid voice trying to explain what a vampire squid is, because I’ve got plenty little-kid voices pontificating about how they didn’t have milk today and so I have to get them some right this very minute and make it a double portion and informing me that their poop was green today and sharing everything they learned when playing Plants vs. Zombies for their 10 minutes of technology time. I feel like murdering my TV, that’s what I feel like. We don’t watch a whole lot of TV, but when we do, my God. I would like those characters to disappear forever.
(Kids shows that are an exception in my book: Fresh Beat Band and Yo Gabba Gabba. If anyone knows how to stream those shows, spill all your secrets. We don’t have cable, so I don’t get to watch my favorite kid shows anymore. I’m dying to know what’s happening with Marina and Shout.)
4. Make our home a Kidz Bop-free zone.
Oh, come on. You know what I’m talking about. That perfectly fine Taylor Swift song that’s sung by a little girl in a particularly nasally way, and instead of the lyrics, “Got a long list of ex-lovers, they’ll tell you I’m insane” the words are changed to something kid-friendly like “Got a list of old friends, they’ll tell you I’m to blame,” and even though it’s almost a little bit clever the way they changed it like that, there is something maddeningly annoying about a kid putting the song on repeat, and now all you hear is “Got a list of old friends, they’ll tell you I’m to blame” when the song plays forty million times on the radio (two months ago, at least). I almost bought my kid a Kidz Bop CD for Christmas, because they really do love them and have been checking them out from the library for months, but then I remembered the songs and the kids’ voices and how they can drive me up one wall and right back down the other.
Nope.
5. Put the kids to bed once and have them stay there.
I know, I know. They should be staying in their beds every night. They should stay put, because I’m the parent. I’m probably not putting my foot down quite forcefully enough. Well, I’ll tell you what. I’ll trade you for a day, let you take care of six boys for twenty-six whole hours and we’ll see if you feel like putting them back to bed three million times at the end of your day. Husband and I are done by the time bedtime rolls around. We’ve gotten really good at pretending not to hear footsteps and laughter and knocking. We lock the little ones in their room, where they can’t get out and terrorize the house or, worse, DIE (they ate a whole tube of toothpaste at 3 a.m. one morning while the rest of the house was sleeping. Husband happened to hear a thump and went to investigate. Twins and a squeezed-empty tube of peppermint delight, also smeared all around their mouths. The clues were hard to ignore.) And then we ignore the rest.
6. Put items in the recycling basket and not have them come climbing back out when the 9-year-old is on trash duty.
My 9-year-old is an environmentalist, and he likes to save things and re-imagine what in the world they could be used for. This is a great thing, except I’m not so keen on climbing into bed with a mascara container he thinks I could reuse if I “just think hard enough.”
7. Stop expecting my children to remember our nightly routine—even though it’s been done every night of their lives.
There are routines we have set firmly in place in our house. Some of them we’ve been doing for as long as the oldest has been alive—nine years. One would think this would be more than enough time to establish that as an every-single-day routine. And yet our kids act like it’s a surprise every night when story time rolls around and it’s time for them to sit quietly in their spots (they thought it was jump-on-the-couch-naked time, but that’s doesn’t even have a time slot on our schedule.). They act surprised that it’s time for lights out when 8:20 rolls around and they have no more time to silently read or write in their journals. They act surprised that they have to take a bath and brush their teeth and put on pajamas because we’re parents who care about good hygiene (mostly).
So, rather than expecting them to remember that this is a routine and we’ve done it every single night, I’m just going to start expecting that they will put up a fight and be pleasantly surprised when they don’t. Optimism and all that.
8. Leave the house once and not have to search for shoes or cups or jackets or kids.
It never fails. Every time we try to leave the house, someone is missing shoes. Or a jacket they remember hanging on their hook when they took it off (yeah, right) is not there. Or someone needs drink real quick. Or someone went missing. Our kids make us late more times than they make us on time, and in the new year, I would just like to leave once without searching for something important, just to prove we can.
9. Take the argument time from two hours to one.
We have one of those strong-willed kids (actually we have a few of them, but two are too young to be skilled at it, thank God). He also happens to be a sticky-brained child, which is, as you might imagine, quite an easy combination to parent. He doesn’t fight about everything, mind you. But he fights about at least one thing every day. He’s become quite skilled at picking his battles. The things that are really important to him—say, building with LEGOs when it’s not time to build with LEGOs because it’s time for him to get in the bath—he will push and push and push until we’re too tired even to breathe anymore. It doesn’t matter how many times you’ve told him that “the answer is no,” he will fight. I would like to lessen the amount of time we spend arguing every day. (It’s not really two hours right now. I’m kidding. Or am I?)
10. Go a whole week without hearing a blood-curdling scream.
I live with a pack of boys. Screaming is what they do, mostly because they prefer to live dangerously. They’ll jump from the tree house to the trampoline and scream when their leg gets caught wrong beneath them. They’ll try to jump from the trampoline to the rock-climbing wall on their play scape and scream when they bonk their head. They’ll slide down the stairs head-first at the same time and scream when somebody got going a little too fast and kicked him in the nose as if kicking a brother in the head would stop his trajectory down. All that to say, I’m not really sure how realistic this goal is, but I’d really like to try.
As you can see, I have big plans for 2016 in my parenting life. It’s a good thing these goals depend on really fickle, unreliable little humans, because otherwise, they’d be way too easy. Goals are supposed to challenge us, right?
Well, challenge accepted.
