by Rachel Toalson | Crash Test featured, Messy Mondays
It used to be so easy. It used to be that when we put something away, it stayed put away. It used to be that I could control the crawling space where my kid would scrutinize every piece of lint or dirt or dropped food, and there was nothing because HE WAS THE ONLY ONE.
Now, when I get down on my knees to do girly pushups and stand back up, there’s all kinds of crap stuck to my skin. Popcorn kernels. Tiny pieces of confetti-like paper. Mostly hair. It doesn’t matter if I just vacuumed 10 seconds ago, I will never be disappointed by the grossness that sticks to the sweat on my kneecaps. Someone in my house sheds like a German Shepherd, and it’s probably me.
And it’s not just those things that are burrowing down into the carpet that resurface when I decide to make an effort and work out (beyond chasing kids, of course), but it’s also the things my kids leave on the floor. When there was only one kid, we were able to manage this. When he took off his jacket, we could help him hang it up where it went. When he decided he didn’t want to wear socks with his tennis shoes, we could make sure those smelly socks got in the hamper. When he wanted to draw a picture of a flying elephant, he put the supplies away.
The problem is, now there are five little boys tearing off their socks and digging things out and forgetting they ever knew how to put things away. And shedding. Apparently.
The other problem is, Littlest One is crawling. That means when he finds dirty, smelly socks on the floor, they go in his mouth. When he finds important school papers spread on the floor, they go in his mouth. When he finds balls of hair they go, you guessed it, in his mouth. Which means we vacuum pretty much every day. Which is probably what we should have been doing in the first place, but who wants to clean a house where seven males live? Not me.
As you can probably imagine, vacuuming every day does not take care of this problem completely. Vacuums don’t suck up things like the insides of a stuffed animal the 3-year-olds thought it would be funny to de-fluff. It doesn’t get rid of dirty underwear no one claims. It doesn’t get rid of colored pencils.
What typically happens when you have more than one kid is that the 3-year-old will decide he wants to color, so he’ll get out the crayons and the colored pencils and his coloring book, because of course you keep all of that where he can reach it easily, because art expression is important in your house, and it’s a better alternative to butter-knife sword fighting with his imaginary friend, which has often been his preference but is definitely not allowed in your house, and then when he’s finished coloring 30 seconds later because he has the attention span of a squirrel, he goes straight for the trains even though the rule in your house is “one thing out at a time.” So then you have The Cleanup Fight, which usually just means a 3-year-old angrily swiping everything that was previously on the table onto the floor, screaming that he is “NOT GOING TO CLEAN THEM UP AND YOU’RE A MEAN BOOTY-FACE” and then collapsing into a pile of noodles right beside the tantrum mess, hopefully scraping his back on one of those colored pencils, so you can bring the point home that “that’s what happens when you.” And then he’ll say he didn’t get them out and he never colored with him, “nuh-uh,” he didn’t, and while you’re reminding him that you were just beside him while he did exactly what he’s saying he didn’t, because you’ll argue to the death with a 3-year-old, the Littlest One will pick up one of those pencils, slobber on it and then try to get it in his mouth. And because his aim isn’t all that great yet, he’ll end up with a mural all over his face.
He was super happy about his first taste of art. And by first taste of art, I mean his first literal taste of art.
I cleaned him off and turned my attention back to the 3-year-old, who was still lifeless on the floor, pretending like he was “too tired to clean up but not tired enough to lie down for his nap early.” The 9-month-old promptly zeroed in on an old diaper that had been left by Husband on the floor.
The moral of that story is: It’s not just kids that complicate things. It’s also husbands.
The other moral of the story is: Clean up your 3-year-old’s messes.
Not really. Because if you do it for them, how will they ever learn to clean up for themselves? And you’re not doing the world any favors sending a kid who doesn’t know how to clean up out into real life, because he’ll never learn it if not here in your home, and if you’re too lazy to teach them something as simple as cleaning up even when they don’t feel like it, then you shouldn’t have had kids.
Or something ridiculous like that.
by Rachel Toalson | Crash Test featured, Crash Test Parents, General Blog
(I’m going to get a little serious in today’s post, so feel free to pass on if what you came here for was humor. I’ll be back to my regularly scheduled program once I get this off my chest.)
There’s this school of thought that really bothers me. It shakes fingers at us and says that if we think parenting is hard or we feel like giving up on a daily or hourly or minute-by-minute basis or we, God forbid, wish our kids would be different, less difficult people for a fleeting moment in time, then we probably shouldn’t have become parents in the first place.
It’s a lie.
It’s a dangerous lie, too, one that keeps us locked in chains as parents, because that’s when we start looking around at all those people who make it look so easy, who make it look as though they’re enjoying every single minute of every single in-the-trenches hour, and we can think that we are somehow deficient in our parenting abilities.
You know what the easy part of parenting is? Making it look easy.
You know what the hard part of parenting is? Every other second.
Parenting is hard. You’ll never hear me say it’s easy. It’s hard because I work really hard at it. And, also, nothing worthwhile was ever easy.
I fail every single day at this parenting gig. Every single day. Sometimes that failing looks like yelling because the 3-year-olds just poured a whole package of brand new crayons out on the table and broke 26 of them in half before I could even get to them, even though I just got done telling them to leave the crayons alone until their brothers got home. Sometimes that failing looks like speaking more sharply than I intended to the 8-year-old because I just warned him not to swing the broom like that, and he decided to do it anyway, and he broke a light. Sometimes it looks like standing in a kitchen and crying without being able to say why I’m crying, just knowing there are two many voices and too many words and too many needs knocking all at once, and it’s overwhelmingly suffocating.
But I will never pretend I don’t fail, because it’s not true. I will never pretend that parenting my six boys is not hard, because it’s not true. The world is not served by facades and pretty little pictures and perfect little examples. The world is served by imperfection and being brave enough to bare it.
So, yeah, parenting feels hard to me. It’s not because I don’t love my children. I love them with a love that is great and deep and wild enough to gouge out whole parts of me that never belonged. They are precious and wonderful and most of all beloved.
Parenting feels hard because I’m trying, every day, to be better at it than I was yesterday. It feels hard because we’re all people and we’re all imperfect and we are living and growing together in ways that can grind and carve and shape. It feels hard because these are tiny little humans we’re talking about, tiny little humans who will one day become men and women, and we get to shepherd them into that, and it is a giant, humbling, magnanimous task. A privilege. But a mountain of responsibility.
I don’t take it lightly.
I would venture to say that if parenting feels easy every second of every day, if there is never a moment where we feel like locking ourselves in a bathroom for just a breath or 50 of them, if we never wish, for that tiny split of a split-second, that they would be different people, we are probably doing it wrong.
The best parts of life take hard work and dedication and perseverance, and the things most worth doing will, at any moment in time, feel hard. That’s how I know I’m on the right track as a parent.
Because, for me, parenting feels hard every time my 8-year-old forgets how he’s been taught to handle his anger and lashes out with hands instead of words, because he’s always been a gifted kid whose emotional development lags behind others his age and we’ve worked really, really hard trying to walk him toward a place of control and knowledge and healthy expression of all the emotions, not just the good ones, and sometimes it just feels like a losing battle. It feels hard when I remember what a brilliant and kind and loving little boy he is and how much good he has the potential to blast into the world, if only he didn’t have this one little thing. It feels hard when I see that school number on my cell, and I wonder if it’s him they’re calling about.
Parenting feels hard every time the 3-year-olds eat a tube of toothpaste and leave the evidence on the counter, because I have to choose not to yell and use my words in ways that will honor and teach and show grace and love even in this discipline moment that’s happened a billion times already. It feels hard when the 6-year-old wakes up on a school morning and barfs all over the Hot Wheels the 3-year-olds dumped out, not just because now it means cleaning all of that up, but also because no mother wants to see her baby sick. It feels hard every time the 5-year-old comes home from school and talks about how one of the boys in his class was mean to him on the playground, because then I just want to throat punch the bullying kid, but I have to talk to my boy about how the people who choose to bully often don’t know any better and need to be shown a better way of making friends, and he’s the one who will have to do it, because he will have to do this brave and kind and world-changing work.
Parenting feels hard when they forget who they are. It’s hard because I love so much, because I want to order their worlds just so, because I want to make their decisions for them, because I don’t want to sit by and watch those consequences break their hearts, but I have to, because it’s the only way they’ll learn and grow and stumble back to who they are.
Sometimes I don’t feel up to this task. Sometimes I don’t feel equipped. Sometimes I want to give up, but I also know that I’m a fighter. I persevere. I keep going. Which is kind of the point of all this parenting in the trenches—to show us what we’re made of. And you know what? I’m made of some pretty tough stuff.
So, no, I’m not going to suck it up, buttercup, because I have discovered something else in my eight years with these delightful little boys. Parenting is hard because I’m doing it right. Because I fail. Because they fail. Because we keep going, all of us together, along the road toward wholehearted living.
There is nothing greater in the world than this.
by Rachel Toalson | Crash Test featured, Crash Test Parents, General Blog
A few weeks ago I got a text from my sister, who had her third baby in February. The text said, “Tell me you have days when you just can’t handle it. When walking out of the house is all you can do to survive. I just need to hear it from another human.”
I laughed out loud, even though I knew she was dead serious. And in my head were responses like “every damn day” and “just this morning” and “on a minute-by-minute basis.”
Parenting is hard. It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done, and I used to run six miles every morning in 10,000-pound humidity before commuting an hour to downtown’s Houston Chronicle office. I used to marathon-train on 10 miles of hills pushing a double baby stroller that carried a 4-year-old and a 3-year-old. I used to work for a narcissist.
Parenting is still the hardest thing I’ve ever done.
There are so many hours of my day that I just feel like giving up and hitch-hiking to downtown San Antonio’s Riverwalk, where Husband and I had a life before children—a life that didn’t include a panic attack every time a kid steps too close to the edge of the path and I imagine having to jump into that dirty black water to save him.
Like the morning last week, when the 3-year-old twins went outside into our very safe (normally) backyard while I transferred a load of laundry from the washing machine to the dryer. Two minutes, tops. That’s all it took. By the time I finished, one of the twins had come back inside, and the whole house smelled like gasoline.
“Why does the house smell like gasoline?” I said, to no one in particular. The twin looked at me. I looked at him. He had his guilty eyes on.
“What were you doing out there?” I said.
“Nuffing,” he said.
I knew it was definitely something, because of those guilty eyes. A mom always knows, after all.
His twin brother came in smelling like a gas pump, so I looked out on the deck, where they didn’t even have the foresight to hide what they’d been doing. There, on a deck chair, was their daddy’s gas can used to fill up the lawn mower the three times a year he mows. That gas can is stored behind a locked door. A locked and sealed door that somehow, SOMEHOW, these Dennis the Menaces had cracked open in less than two minutes.
They poured gasoline (less than half a gallon, for those who are concerned) all over the back deck, the grass and themselves. It’s a good thing no one in my house smokes, because we all would have been blown to high heaven.
I put them both in the bath (which was not on the schedule for the morning) while the baby stayed downstairs in his jumper seat wailing because he doesn’t like to be alone, and washed them, rinsed them, scrubbed them, rinsed them and washed them again. Husband sprayed off the deck (which also wasn’t on the schedule for the morning) and saturated all the grass, because a Texas summer hits 4,000 degrees, and we were afraid the sun might make the gasoline-drenched grass spontaneously combust and blow us all to high heaven anyway.
That morning was one of those give-up days, because there’s no way to be one step ahead in my house. There’s no way I can fully toddler-proof every room. There’s no way I can keep them out of every single thing they find to amuse themselves. It would take 23 of me.
That morning I wanted to walk out and let them fend for themselves in gasoline scented clothes that spread their stench all over the house in less than two seconds.
I used to feel guilty when feelings like this crept up. I used to beat myself up for sometimes wishing that they just weren’t twins, that there weren’t two of them ALL THE DANG TIME, that they weren’t so insatiably curious and 3 years old and nearly impossible to parent right now.
But there is something important I’ve learned in my years of parenting: Just because there are moments when we want to run away, when we want to flat-out give up, when we want to trade our kids for easier kids for just this little moment in time so we can catch up and learn to appreciate them again, it doesn’t mean that we don’t still love them with a love that is never-ending.
These little, irrational humans can be the best and worst people we know on any given day at any given moment.
There are days when I want to sit down and color next to my 3-year-olds, because they’ve just been playing so well together and the morning’s disasters have been minimal, and, gosh, I just love them so much, and then there are mornings when I want to put them on Craig’s list’s free page (I’d have to lie to really sell the idea, though. Something like “Two well behaved twins, of undetermined age.” Because what kind of crazy person would want two 3-year-olds voluntarily?)
There are hours when I love to comb through those old picture albums that show these two hooked up to machines because they were premature and remember how I fretted and cried and tried my best to help them learn how to eat, and there are days when those first moments feel like entire lifetimes apart from this moment, when they stuck their whole arm in the just-used toilet to see what poop floating in pee feels like (They already know. We’ve done this drill before.).
There are minutes when I pull them into my lap and kiss all over their faces until they’re giggling uncontrollably, because they’re getting so big and so fun, and then there are minutes when I’m half-heartedly holding their big brother away from them so he doesn’t clobber them for marking all over his journal with a giant red permanent marker they found lying around somewhere (who keeps giving us permanent markers? Please stop.).
Parenting is not for the weak. This is the hardest responsibility we will ever have in our lives. Raising another human being to be a decent person is not easy, and there are many times along our journeys when we will feel like giving up and giving in and giving out.
It just comes with the territory.
So I fire off my response to my sweet sister. “Yes,” I say. “Just about every day. Doesn’t mean you’re a bad mother.”
Because it doesn’t.
These moments when we feel the tension between wanting to give up and knowing we can’t make us stronger parents. They make us better people. They drag us into a deeper understanding of love.
Good thing, too. Because my toddler just figured out how to open a can of paint Husband left unguarded and now the pantry wall has a Thermal Spring scribble-masterpiece drying on it.
I’m going to be one amazing person by the time this is all over.
by Rachel Toalson | Crash Test featured, General Blog
Sometimes I feel like I’m doing a pretty good job as a parent. Relationships are good, all those consequences we’ve put into our Family Playbook—a list of infractions and their expected consequences—are well understood, the house is in almost perfect order.
And then my children wake up.
It only takes seconds to realize that they are completely different people today.
Not only have they forgotten all the new infractions and consequences we brainstormed yesterday, but they also no longer care about getting to school on time or wearing clean clothes or keeping their room even the slightest bit tidy.
Yesterday my two older boys came down for breakfast fifty minutes before we had to leave for school. Today they were still not eating breakfast 10 minutes before we had to walk out the door, and I had to shout my last you’re-not-going-to-get-breakfast warning above the volume of an audio book, because I’m too lazy to walk up the stairs for the sixteenth time (I blame my laziness on my broken foot. And Post Traumatic Stress, which I feel every time I approach stairs).
Yesterday they liked the grilled broccoli and cauliflower and carrots we brushed with olive oil and sprinkled with sea salt and roasted in the oven. Today they gagged just looking at them.
Yesterday they all sat perfectly still in their separate spaces while their daddy read two picture books and I read a Narnia chapter book and again while we engaged in our ten minutes of Sustained Silent Reading time and then again while we did our meditation breathing and prayer time. We didn’t have to remind them once to get back in their spots or stop talking or that, no, an art journal is not a book you read and, no, the pen in your hand is not necessary during reading time (unless you’re taking notes—which he was clearly not).
Today they think reading time means chase-your-brother-around-the-library time.
It’s enough to drive a parent insane.
I’ve often joked that parenting is like living in an insane asylum. But the joke is usually true.
Insanity is defined by Albert Einstein as “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
THIS IS WHAT KIDS DO, EVERY SINGLE DAY.
They try to write during story time, even though we’ve told them a billion times it’s not allowed. They try to sneak that LEGO toy into the bath tub, thinking this time will surely be different and we won’t object. They seem surprised that 8 p.m. is lights out, even though nothing has changed in their thousands of nights.
The problem is, our kids are the least consistent people on the planet. Every single day they wake up completely different people.
The bigger problem, though, is that they give us that one little taste of expectation realization, and we think they CAN sit still for two stories and a chapter book.
And we keep expecting it every other day.
For as long as we’ve had twins, I have fantasized about two boys napping in the same bedroom for more than an hour and a half.
We were spoiled, because our older boys took three-hour naps and could be trusted to sleep in their rooms with their doors closed.
The first time we left the twins for three hours with the door closed, they pulled down the forty-four shirts in their closet, painted with poop and ate the cardboard pages of Goodnight Moon.
So the next time I set a timer for two hours (because surely they’d just woken up early) and I sat outside their door to work on some deadline material. I could hear them shrieking, but we’d baby proofed everything, and there were only two mattresses on their floor (not even beds, because the twins could destroy furniture in 3.4 seconds). Nothing they could get into. Nothing that would hurt them. Nothing to occupy them for two hours.
They got really quiet, but I didn’t worry. We’re all quiet when we’re sleeping.
When the timer went off, I opened their door and found them sitting on clouds, all the stuffing ripped out of the lone Beanie Boo someone had left in their room.
The next day, I opened their door. I sat right outside. I corrected them when they so much as moved.
AND THEY FELL ASLEEP. FOR TWO WHOLE HOURS.
Oh, thank God, I said. It is possible.
So, of course, the next day, I did the exact same thing. Except as soon as they were asleep, I went to my room to do some more involved work and make a few business phone calls. Two hours later, they had knocked their closet doors off the hinges, strung all their ties from the ceiling fan and neatly lined up all their shoes under their mattresses.
Oh my word.
It’s maddening and confusing and impossible to keep up with these every-day-different children.
It’s impossible to know that today the 8-year-old only got seven hours of sleep but will wake up the happiest kid in the world, but tomorrow he’ll get 12 hours of sleep and will wake up gnawing on all the heads he bit off before breakfast.
It’s impossible to know that today the 6-year-old will follow all the rules and help with everything around the house, and tomorrow he will wake up a defiant little monster.
It’s impossible to know that today the 4-year-old will love reading those books to me but tomorrow he will wake up acting like he’d rather eat spinach than finish the last five sentences of that Little Bear story.
What’s a parent to do?
We just keep doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results from this insane asylum. Because, you know. Consistency and all.
Also because sometimes it does work, and those times it works might just be enough to power us through the times it doesn’t.
And if they’re not, well. At least there’s red wine. And chocolate.
And a lock on our bedroom door they haven’t yet learned to pick (it’s coming).
by Rachel Toalson | Crash Test featured, General Blog
I don’t know if I’ve ever faced a harder challenge in my parenting years than raising twins.
Maybe it’s because our twins came near the end of the line of boys and they see all their older brothers do, and they expect that life will be exactly like that for them.
Except there are two of them.
Oh, you want to drink out of a big-boy cup because your older brother did it when he was 2? I’m sorry. There are two of you.
Oh, you want to sit free at the table instead of strapped into your chairs because all your brothers did it when they were almost 3? I’m sorry. There are two of you.
What? You want me to leave the baby gate on your door open because you haven’t yet figured out how to climb over it (it’s coming)? I’m sorry. In case you haven’t noticed, THERE ARE TWO OF YOU.
Out twins are identical, two sides of the same egg. Nature’s gift, doctors say. One is left-handed, one is right-handed. They complete each other.
That’s part of the problem. What one doesn’t think of, the other does. What one is afraid to do, the other will try.
It’s like having four toddler wrecking balls walking around the house, scheming about what they can destroy next. I imagine their conversations go a little something like this:
Twin 1: Hey. Hey, bro. Mama’s not watching. Remember how she told us not to touch this computer? She’ll never know. Where is she?
Twin 2: She’s in the bathroom. Remember what we did last time she was in the bathroom?
Twin 1: Oh, man. That was fun. But this computer. She’ll never know. I just can’t figure out how to open it.
Twin 2: Like this. But how do you turn it on?
Twin 1: Easy. I’ve seen Daddy press this button right here.
Twin 2: There it is.
(Mama comes back into the room with the baby she just changed.)
Twin 1: Close it, close it, close it!
Twin 2: Walk away. Not too fast, not too slow. Just enough to look like we weren’t doing anything.
I love my twins. Of course I do. It’s just that they were unexpected.
If I could have read a primer two years ago, this is what it might have said:
Every parent of twins needs…
1. An extra dose of patience.
You will need this for many things. You will need it for the stranger at the store who asks to see your amazing bundles of joy and, after looking at their angelic sleeping faces, declares she “always wanted twins” and you want to say, “Oh, really? Then take mine,” because one was up screaming at 3 a.m. and as soon as you got him calmed down two hours later the other one woke up screaming, and as soon as you got that one calmed down an hour later all the other boys were up asking for breakfast. Which woke up the twins, who were also hungry. Again.
You will need it for when they learn to talk and there are so.many.words and so.many.whys and so many demands for everything under the sun. You will need it for the potty training and the big-boy-bed transitions and the constant fighting from dawn until dusk.
You will need it for the times you were helping one out of his pajamas and into his day clothes and you return back downstairs to find all the jackets removed from your poetry books and spread across the living room floor like a special carpet for toddler feet, for the six thousandth time (You should probably just put those books away, Mama. Far, far away.).
I’m an angel. That’s what this face says. Keep this picture close. You’ll need it for the times you wonder if he really is the devil.
2. Good decision-making skills.
These will come into play those times they both wake up at 3 a.m. because they’re hungry. Which one do you feed first? (Answer: You’ll figure out a way to feed both.)
You’ll need these skills when one twin is in the downstairs bathroom playing with a plunger in a potty you specifically remember your older boy didn’t flush five minutes ago when he stunk it up and the other is in his bathroom upstairs finger painting the mirror with a whole tube of eco-friendly toothpaste. Which do you get first? (Answer: The toilet one. Toothpaste is much easier to clean than the mess an overzealous plunger can make.)
You’ll need them when the one who’s known for wandering does exactly that, moves from his nap time place while you take a minute or five for a shower, because it’s been four days since the last one, and you walk out to find him playing with the computer he’s been told 50 billion times to leave alone and, in his panic to close it, he deletes the 1,500 words you wrote this morning before kids got up. What do you do? (Answer: Cry.)
3. A rigorous workout regime.
When one is running down the street because someone forgot to lock the deadbolt he can’t reach and another is going out back without shoes in 26-degree rain, you’ll want to be in shape for that. I recommend interval training. That way when they stop and change directions, you’ll be ready. You’ve done this a thousand times. Ski jumps. Football runs. All-out sprints.
When they slip, unnoticed (because they’re like ninjas), into the playroom while you’re wiping down the table after a ridiculously messy lunch, and both of them come out with their scooters, you’ll want to be able to wrestle those “cooters” from screaming, flailing bodies without hurting anyone.
And when one collapses in the middle of the park because it’s time to go and he’s not ready yet and the other thinks that just might work, you’ll need strong arms to carry 32 pounds of kicking and screaming twins back to the car, one tucked under each armpit.
4. Containment measures.
This would be things like strollers until they’re 3 and booster seats until they’re 4 and a baby gate on their door until they’re…15. Okay, maybe 13.
It also means leashes at the city zoo on a packed day, even though you said you’d never use them and you can feel the disapproval of other people and you want to say, “Come talk to me when you have 2-year-old twins. These things have saved their lives 17 billion times, and that was before we even got out of the parking lot.”
Containment saves lives. And sanity.
Twins are great. And hard. And maddening. And great. And so hard.
They can disassemble an 8-year-old’s room of LEGO Star Wars ships in 3.1 seconds. They can disassemble a heart with one identical smile and a valiant try at saying “Uptown funk you up” that sounds like it should have come with a bleep.
There’s just nothing like them in the world. You’ll be so glad you get to be their mama.
Especially after they fall asleep.
