by Rachel Toalson | General Blog, Stuff Crash Test Kids say
Husband: Give me the fly swatter.
4-year-old: But I want to die a fly.
Husband: You want to die a fly?
Me: Well, that is quite an aspiration.
9-year-old: Mama, I have DNA samples of myself on my desk.
Me: Oh, really?
9-year-old: Yeah. A fingernail, a toenail and hair. I was hoping to go to a science place and clone myself so one of me could go to school and one could stay home.
Me:
9-year-old:
Me:
9-year-old: What?
5-year-old [bouncing on Husband’s back]: You’re…really…squishy.
Husband: The reason we don’t do that is because [blah blah blah]
9-year-old: You’re overwhelming me. You’re using too many words.
5-year-old: Daddy, I have to go pee.
Husband: So go pee.
5-year-old: My brother is already peeing. I guess I’ll have to pee on his face.
Husband: That is definitely not an option. Nope.
4-year-old: I forgot.
Me: You forgot what?
4-year-old: I FORGOT!
Husband: You forgot to talk?
4-year-old: YYYEEEEESSSSSS.
Me: I don’t think you’ve ever had a problem with that, actually.
6-year-old: Sometimes when I’m running, I trip over my leg.
Me: Well, that sounds like a problem.
6-year-old: Yeah. It is.
Husband: What do you want to be when you grow up?
4-year-old: I want to be a caveman when I grow up.
Me: That shouldn’t be too hard.
9-year-old: Daddy, while I was getting dressed, I was thinking about all the different ways you can kill a chicken.
Husband:
9-year-old:
Husband: That’s sounds…normal.
7-year-old: Hey, Mama. Guess what?
Me: I hate guessing games.
7-year-old: But guess what.
Me: What.
7-year-old: Nothing.
Me:
7-year-old: I made that up.
9-year-old: We’re starting a mine in our back yard. Asa’s digging, and we’re picking up strange rocks and old wood.
Me: Oh! I’m so excited!
9-year-old: You’re being sarcastic, aren’t you.
9-year-old: You’re the only parents in the whole world who make their kids do chores!
Husband:
Me:
9yo:
Husband & Me: hahahahahahahaha
Husband: Where is your brain?
4-year-old: In my tummy.
Me: Sounds about right.
Me: Did you know I won a poetry award today?
4-year-old: Because you burp really loud?
7-year-old: Daddy it’s raining!
Husband: I know. It’s crazy. My weather app says it’s zero percent chance of rain.
7-year-old: How does the weatherman keep his job when he’s wrong so much?
Husband: In the future, when we come to church, you need to not wear flip flops. And pants with no holes in them.
8-year-old: Yeah, and I should also probably wear underwear.
Husband:
8-year-old: Regrettably, I had a little bit of diarrhea in my underwear this morning.
Husband:
8-year-old:
Husband: Well, then.
9-year-old: So we’re not going to the pool?
Husband: No. We told you guys to clean up, and you didn’t.
9-year-old: I was going to come downstairs, but my brothers were chasing me with a banana.
7-year-old: Did you hear my toot? It made me go really fast.
Me: Too bad the smell didn’t go really fast with you.
7-year-old: [laughing hysterically]
Me: [passing out on the floor]
9-year-old: If you touch a fly and put your finger in your mouth, will you die?
Me: Why would you want to?
9-year-old: Maybe accidentally?
Husband: No. Think about it. You live in a house with twins. They’ve done much worse, and they’re still alive.
9-year-old: I’ll probably be really popular now that I’m the son of an author.
Me: Just make sure you wear deodorant.
9yo: Why?
by Rachel Toalson | General Blog
I’m a working mom. I’m really good at what I do. I studied for four years in college and ended my time with a degree in journalism and English. I used to work as a managing editor for a newspaper, and I rocked that job every single day. Before that, I was a reporter. Now I’m an author.
I know exactly what I’m doing when faced with a blank screen. I know how to create stories from thin air, how to pull from my experiences and craft an essay that someone would actually want to read, how to position words on a page so that I can communicate what it is I’m trying to communicate. I’ve been doing this every single day for more than a decade.
I’ve also been a mother every single day for almost a decade. You’d think that after this long, almost ten years spent in the School of Parenting, I would have a slight idea of what I’m doing.
But I don’t.
When I open the door to my twins’ room, where they were supposed to be taking naps, and I see that they’ve just colored themselves green with a marker they smuggled in their room while their daddy’s back was turned, I don’t know what to do. When the 9-year-old’s mood flips at the drop of a LEGO mini figure and suddenly the whole entire world is ending, I don’t know what I’m doing. When the normally complacent and obedient child becomes a back-talking fool and I have to address all that sass, I have no idea what I’m doing.
I study parenting books, pouring over them for all the wisdom they have to offer me. I’ll read examples about children in the middle of rebellion, and I’ll think, “Yes, I can totally do this,” and then the 6-year-old will sneak out the door with a piece of gum I just told him he couldn’t have and surreptitiously stick it in his mouth while his back is turned to me, and all of that wisdom goes right out the door with him.
My children have the ability to turn me into a completely bumbling idiot with one disrespectful look or one ridiculous prank or one irreverent question or simply their state of being.
When they sneak out of their beds on a Saturday morning before the sun has even deemed it time to wake, just so they can get into the frosted mini wheats and make sure they get their fair share, I don’t know what I’m doing.
When they eat half their brother’s deodorant in the bathroom while everyone else is sleeping, I don’t know what I’m doing.
When they fill up the bath water to a flooding point, even though they’ve been told a billion times not to, I don’t know what I’m doing.
When a boy comes home and tells me about a bully on his school playground, I don’t know what I’m doing.
When the 4-year-olds take the canister of gasoline that sits behind a locked shed and pour it all over the yard, I don’t know what I’m doing.
When they wake up in a horrible mood, even though they got plenty of sleep (because I’m psycho about their sleep), I don’t know what I’m doing.
When they refuse to love each other, I don’t know what I’m doing.
When the angry one threatens to run away because we’re the worst parents ever, I don’t know what I’m doing.
When one wakes in the middle of the night just to tell me he’s feeling sick and then, before the words are even completely out of his mouth, something else comes rocketing out of his mouth, too, I don’t know what I’m doing.
When one of them suffers from anxiety and depression, even though I’ve lived with these myself, I don’t know what I’m doing.
When they take off their seatbelt in the car while we’re driving 70 miles per hour down a busy highway, I don’t know what I’m doing.
When I think of how impossible it is to give all of me to all of them, I don’t know what I’m doing.
When they’re all talking to me at the same exact time, I don’t know what I’m doing.
When they get in a slap-fight, I don’t know what I’m doing.
When I tell them they can’t fly from the top of their daddy’s shed to the trampoline and they try it anyway, I don’t know what I’m doing.
When the 4-year-old cuts a huge hole in his brand new shirt, because someone left the scissors out, I don’t know what I’m doing.
When I worry that I don’t know how to help the one who flies off the handle, I don’t know what I’m doing.
When I worry about them, period, I don’t know what I’m doing.
When they mouth off one minute and then the next minute they act like I’m their best friend, I don’t know what I’m doing.
When I think about the next stage I’m coming into as a mother—the Puberty one—I don’t know what I’m doing.
That’s okay. Here’s a secret most parents won’t ever willingly tell you: We’ll never completely know what we’re doing. Our children are grand experiments—some days we get it right, some days we don’t.
Before my twins were released from their 20-day stay in the neonatal intensive care unit at our local hospital, Husband and I had to take an infant CPR class in order to take them home. We learned all sorts of things we’d done wrong with our three older boys. At the end of the class, we looked at each other and sort of laugh-cried and said, “It’s a miracle they all survived.”
It’s a miracle any kid survives, because we’re all pretty much clueless.
[Tweet “We can spend a lifetime parenting and never feel competent at it. We’re a community of scientists.”]
We can spend a lifetime in this job and never feel quite competent at it. We can read books and take classes and listen to what other parents do and try it with our own, but the truth is, we’re all basically on the same playing field—that is, amateurs. What works today probably won’t work tomorrow. So just when we think we have it figured out, our kids will promptly show us that we don’t actually have anything at all figured out.
Parenting is hard. We’re dealing with irrational humans on an everyday, every-hour basis. We’re never going to know everything. We’ll never anticipate everything they’ll do. We’ll never be able to predict who our children will be when they wake up tomorrow. They are daily growing and changing and coming into their own bodies and minds, and that means that the best we can do is sit back and let it happen and try to roll with the uppercuts, devising our next grand experiment for what might possibly work to turn them into a rational, kind, courageous, creative, joyful, gracious, enjoyable adult.
No parent really knows what he’s (or she’s) doing. That means we, the clueless, are all in good company.
[Tweet “No parent really knows what he’s (or she’s) doing. We, the clueless, are all in good company.”]
Now, please excuse me, because my kid just told me I owe him a million dollars for making him sit down and do his homework and for being the worst parent ever, so I have an experiment that’s calling my name.
by Rachel Toalson | Crash Test Parents, 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 the walls 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’d fall asleep eventually.
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 boiled, unsalted spinach than finish the last five sentences of that Little Bear story.
What’s a parent to do?
Well, 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 (I’m sure it’s coming).
This is an excerpt from Parenting Is the Hardest Insane Asylum Ever, a humor book that does not yet have a release date. To read more of my humor essays, visit Crash Test Parents.
by Rachel Toalson | General Blog
Husband and I recently celebrated our anniversary. With the kids.
Most years we try to get at least a couple of days away from the kids so that we can enjoy a little one-on-one time and actually finish conversations instead of keeping them running throughout a whole day to pick back up in the spaces where kids aren’t talking, which is hardly ever. Actually it’s never, so you have conversations in your heads and forget it was all imaginary and then you get mad at each other when it’s time to go to that school meeting you talked about earlier this week and one of you didn’t remember. Because the conversation never happened. You just thought it did.
But this year our anniversary fell on a weekend when my parents could not take the children, because they live in a small town, and they were having a bake sale where my mom, the town library director, was expected to make an appearance. She couldn’t juggle six kids while trying to sell brownies. I don’t blame her. That would be a losing battle, unless she wanted to buy all the brownies.
So after we put the kids to bed on Saturday night, we watched an episode of Game of Thrones, season two (I know we’re way behind. Watching something together is like having a conversation together—it hardly ever happens, except in your imagination.). And then we were so tired we just went to bed at a wimpy 10 p.m. instead of the typical Friday night’s midnight hour—and it’s a good thing we did, because the 3-year-old twins decided, at 4 a.m., that they were going to climb over the baby gate barring their room for sanity purposes and go exploring the library unsupervised, which is always a scary proposition with twins.
The library is right outside our bedroom, and we totally would have heard their pounding footsteps and victory-cry screeching if Husband hadn’t turned up the “storm sounds” white noise on the computer so we could get some sleep by pretending there were no kids in the house. So the 8-year-old took it upon himself to knock on our door and let us know his brothers were “running wild in the library.”
They weren’t in there for long, but already one of them had eaten nearly a whole tube of toothpaste that he climbed a cabinet in the bathroom to get and emptied out a bottle of essential oil Husband had left next to a diffuser. His whole mouth smelled like Peace & Calming with some strawberry thrown in like an afterthought. So we took Strawberry Shortcake back to bed, along with his probably-not-innocent-either-but-we-couldn’t-find-any-evidence brother and closed their door, which has a lock on the outside (because twins. That’s all I’m going to say. You can judge if you want. I don’t care. Because twins.).
Husband and I really wanted to go back to sleep, because we still had two more hours until we needed to be up to get everyone ready for church, but the problem was, the shrieking banshees who had been set loose in the library minutes before had already woken the rest of the boys. We told them to read in the library for the next two hours, because they love to read and we love to sleep.
When we woke up at 7, everyone was crying. The 8-year-old was crying because he was starving, and he was going to die if he didn’t get anything to eat RIGHT THIS MINUTE. The 6-year-old was crying because his older brother, in a fit of anger, had taken a book right out of his hands. The 5-year-old was crying because he’s 5 and that’s enough explanation in his mind. The 3-year-olds were crying because they were up at 4. The baby was crying because he heard all his brothers crying, and he decided he should probably be crying, too.
We explained to everyone that it was our anniversary and they should be the ones fixing us breakfast, but no one seemed to like that idea, so Husband went downstairs to cook a feast of toast with jam, while I showered and put on a little makeup, because I’m not a big fan of scaring church people away with my nakedness. Naked face, that is. Geez. The words aren’t coming out right. I’ve been up since 4.
And then we left for church half an hour late and blissfully handed the boys off to the nursery workers and Sunday school teachers, not saying a word about how they’d probably be really grouchy because everyone had been up since 4, and then we went out with the baby into the service. Two minutes in, the baby started happily shrieking in the middle of the pastor’s talk, so all the heads (smiling mostly) turned toward me while I tried to gracefully exit the row and, in typical Rachel fashion, tripped over some chairs and nearly crapped my pants because I didn’t want to drop the baby. This story has a happy ending, because I didn’t drop the baby or crap my pants. But I did end up with a busted-up knee. Much better than a busted-up baby or a pair of smelly drawers.
Baby and I danced in the entry-way of the church while I counted down the minutes until the boys would be ours again.
When we got back home, the house was a wreck, because the day before we’d taken everybody to the city zoo and Husband and I didn’t feel like enforcing any of the normal cleanup rules when we got back home, because six kids out at the zoo sucks enough energy to last a whole forty-eight hours. So after we wrestled every crayon we own—about a billion—out of the twins’ hands and put them down for their naps, the 8-year-old found his way to our room and said, “Because it’s your anniversary, I’ll do whatever you want me to do for you. And the rest of this week, too.”
Which was sweet and all, except “whatever you want me to do for you” doesn’t actually mean whatever you want me to do for you, because I asked him to cook dinner, and he said that probably wouldn’t be safe, which is probably true, and then I asked him to watch his brothers so his daddy and I could go for a walk around the cul-de-sac, and he said he could do anything but watching his brothers and cooking dinner, and then I asked him to clean up his room because it was a mess, and he said he would do anything for me, and cleaning his room wasn’t for me, so I just gave up after that.
We cooked our dinner of pasta in Vodka sauce and sat around the table telling stories about the early days before Husband and I were married, while the kids listened with silly grins on their faces, because what’s better than watching a mama and daddy who love each other tell stories about how they came to be? And after all that we put them all to bed so we could stuff our faces with the salted caramel cupcakes we’d hidden in the pantry.
It was divine. Truly. Best anniversary ever. Except for the one where we ditched the kids and went to Disney World. But this one was a very distant second.
This is an excerpt from Parenting is the Hardest Insane Asylum Ever, which does not yet have a release date. For more of Rachel’s humor writings, visit Crash Test Parents.
by Rachel Toalson | General Blog
Husband and I used to be in a band. Well, we still are. We just don’t ever play the songs we’re still writing, because we have six kids. But before those six kids, we played all over Texas and took a few tours through Arizona, Colorado and New Mexico. We wrote our own songs and practiced every day and stayed up way too late playing gigs.
When the first son was born, we continued our pursuit, because we enjoyed doing it and wanted, secretly, to be rockstars. And Son #1 was super easy to pack up and take along with us, because he loved music and enjoyed meeting new people who fawned all over him and was amazingly tolerant of long trips.
Son #2 came along two years later, and it was still relatively easy. We just packed for two kids instead of one. We brought a friend along who could watch the kids while we did our hour-long set on stage, and then I’d rescue the friend while Husband and the other band members went to talk to people at the merch table.
Then came son #3. I won’t say he meant to change everything. It’s just the logistics of it. When parents go from two to three kids, everything gets real. You’ve suddenly run out of hands. And eyes. And ability to focus.
Two weeks after he was born, we boarded a plane to fly to Arizona and record our third album, and we took them all with us so I could worry the whole time about what if the oldest wandered off when one of us wasn’t looking because the baby needed to be fed and he was still so tiny and cute and wonderful and I just couldn’t take my eyes off him but I also couldn’t take my eyes off the older walking ones. We made it, with twelve new gray hairs.
But when it came time to promote our album, here’s where the “we can still do this” really fell through. Because there aren’t a whole lot of people who enjoy watching a 3-year-old, a 16-month-old and a one-month-old. We tried to limp along for a while, and then the twins came along and life was completely over. Because twins.
Ever since I was a little kid I’ve wanted to be two things: a writer and a rock star. I get to be one of them, writing every single day of my life, and it’s bliss. And, for the other, well, this is all I got.
Being a rockstar used to mean fame.
I know it sounds shallow to put it like that, but doesn’t any performer who’s good at what they do dream of this? Packed crowds chanting the band’s name and singing along to songs with their camera phones as “lighters?” Fans wanting to meet us just to shake our hand or say a few words to us? People dancing in their places or moshing or whatever kids do these days, even if they can’t hear a note of the music because they’re screaming too loudly?
Actually, this sounds exactly like my house. There’s a packed crowd chanting my name when it’s time for dinner and I haven’t started anything yet. There’s a line of kids wanting a minute of our attention because they have to tell us their brother took the toy they were playing with and they’re really sad about that and they need help getting it back. And there are little boys dancing or moshing (mostly unintentionally, but this is what happens when you’re eight people in a small living room and Imagine Dragons is playing on Pandora) and screaming so loudly you can’t hear a note of the music because we’re playing one of the songs we wrote for them and they just want “If You’re Happy and You Know It” or the Kidz Bop version of anything Taylor Swift.
Being a rockstar used to mean a whole crew of roadies.
Roadies are people who carry all the heavy stuff and help set up the equipment and wait around until the show is over just so they can help you do it all again. They’re pretty handy people.
And I suppose, in a way, I still have roadies, because when we go to the local museum, the 8-year-old does do the heavy lifting with those books he likes to bring everywhere, even though we didn’t ask him to bring them. And the 5-year-old will load up that backpack with a thousand stuffed animals he wanted to bring along so they could see the lions at the zoo, and he’ll carry it the whole time. And one of the 3-year-olds will always try to get the picnic lunch out of the car and accidentally dump it out on the sidewalk so the birds come swooping. I know. He’s just trying to help, like roadies do.
Being a rockstar used to mean a whole closet of cool clothes.
I thought long and hard about what I wanted to look like on stage. I was the only female in a band of males, and I needed to stand out. Be noticed. That meant bold colors and dramatic makeup and shoes that were comfortable but still said “Woman.”
And it’s true that I do wear a bright orange workout shirt about once a week with my uniform workout pants and I have gone dramatic with the makeup and adopted the “naked face” look, and my shoes do say “Woman” because they’re fluorescent pink running shoes that allow me to chase after my 3-year-olds when they get a wild hair every other minute and decide they’re going to sprint in two different directions and see who Mama catches first. My cool clothes have just become be-prepared-to-run-at-all-times clothes.
Being a rockstar used to mean a glamorous life.
Of course we would meet all the famous people, like Simon Cowell or Ed Sheeran or maybe just Adam Sandler. We’d sit down to fancy dinners and wipe our mouths with silky napkins and engage in stimulating conversation. We would get in the car and cruise to a party at any hour of any day.
Okay, so, yes, I get to meet famous people like the 8-year-old’s principal or the 5-year-old’s best friend (he talks about her ALL THE TIME) and I get to sit down to a dinner of sun-roasted tomato parmesan pasta with the cloth napkins we made ourselves and engage in stimulating conversation like how we could do a sugar experiment with ice cream and root beer, because that’s what they did in class today and they DRANK IT ALL AND IT WAS SO YUMMY and now they can’t stay at the table because they have too much energy and they need to ruuuuuuunnnn. And even though it takes us three hours just to leave the house, we still get to go to the occasional party when the kids are invited, (because sitters for six kids are hard to find). What kind of person would want to party at all hours of the day, anyway? My kids are up all hours of the day. Midnight and I have become intimately familiar, and let me just tell you, he’s pretty exhausting.
I used to want to be a rockstar. And this is all I got.
But you know what? I don’t think this parenting gig was the short end of the stick at all. Mostly because I get to feel like a rockstar every single day. I feel like a rockstar when my kid is whining and I just can’t take it anymore and I miraculously don’t yell but calmly say that his whining makes me feel like the tea kettle that’s going off on the stove. I feel like a rockstar when I finally get dinner on the table without losing my mind from all the “I’m hungrys” following me around and not one of them complains about what we’re having for once. I feel like a rockstar every time I get out the door in the morning with all six kids dressed and wearing mostly matching shoes.
I feel like a rockstar when I climb out of bed after a night cleaning up puke. I feel like a rockstar when I remember my toothbrush on a trip, because I usually pack for the kids first. I feel like a rockstar when they smile at me after a long day like I’m the most important person in the world.
Every parent who is raising a human being to be a decent person is a rockstar, because we have legions of adoring fans (okay, a handful at the most), even if we’re the ones who gave them life; and we have a glamorous life, even if it looks like eating dinner at the same table every night and parties at home and conversation about what they did in school today; and we have songs, every day, in all the spaces of life, because those songs are the voices of our children, chanting their demands and complaining about their problems and murmuring their “I love yous” when we most need them.
So what if I used to want to be a rockstar and this is all I got?
What I got is love and fun and adventure and life. So much more than I ever dared to dream.
This is an excerpt from , Parenting Is the Hardest Insane Asylum Ever, a humor book that does not yet have a release date. To read more of my humor essays, visit Crash Test Parents.
by Rachel Toalson | General Blog
Whether or not you want to become a parent is relatively easy to decide. Those tiny little babies. So cute. So cuddly. So snuggly and soft and warm. Smelling of…
Well, everything nice, of course.
So when it came time for Husband and me to discuss the possibility of starting a family, it wasn’t such a hard decision. I wanted one of those tiny cute cuddly babies. It was time.
What you don’t consider before you decide to have a baby is that one day that baby will be a willful 3-year-old. And then he’ll be a spirited 8-year-old. And then she’ll be, God help you, 13.
It’s not just the emotional and physical expenditure that will change as your tiny little baby, who only wants to eat and sleep and poop and stays put wherever you lay him, grows. Your entire lifestyle will change. We weren’t ready for this. I don’t know if any parent is, because these are the things you don’t think about when all you can see is BABY.
I think about them now. Every time I get a utility bill in the mail or shop for groceries or just try to do something as simple as leaving the house.
What you don’t think about is that when your baby becomes a kid, there’s
The much higher utility bills.
You won’t notice this one right away, because, well, babies stay put. They don’t know how to turn on lights, which is your saving grace for a couple of years. You won’t run into this problem until your kid gets really good at turning on lights but doesn’t as quickly figure out how to turn them off. Or ever figure it out, which is more likely the case. You’ll leave the house following behind Kid 1 while Kid 2 follows behind you, looking for something. And everyone knows that to look for something, you need lights.
Someday, when the baby is no longer a baby, he will also enjoy plugging up a toilet with toilet paper so he has to flush five times in a row and the toilet never fills up so it runs for half an hour before you notice. He’ll forget to completely turn off the bathroom faucet after he’s finally, finally, finally brushed his teeth after your thirtieth reminder, and it will run all night, because you were too worn out to stumble out of your bed, again, to check. He’ll one day be 3 and think it’s funny to see your face turn purple when he sneaks into the backyard and lets the water hose run, and the only way you know is when you’re going out to put the trash in the bin and you slip in a gigantic mud puddle and call Husband home because a sprinkler has busted and you don’t know what to do (Nope. It’s just the 3-year-old, watering the grass. For five hours).
Higher utility bills. There’s not much you can do about them, unless you cancel all your utilities and Little House on the Prairie it.
The grocery bill that will make you weep.
It doesn’t matter if you’re breastfeeding or bottle feeding, you are in for a treat. You won’t even recognize your grocery budget in a few years. Kids are always, always, always hungry, always, and you certainly don’t want them bumming food off their friends at school, because you know what happens when they get sugar in their system. (What happens? Read on.)
The fact that bouncing off the walls is a real thing.
You will watch them do it after attending their friend’s birthday parties. You’ll see the evidence in wall nicks and holes their hands accidentally made in doors when they ran into it too hard, and you’ll make a mental note to fix them all, but it will never happen. Because kids. And then you will vow never, ever to let them go to another birthday party. And then another invitation will come three days later, because they’re in kindergarten and all twenty-five students have birthdays, and they have to invite everyone in their class, because this is school rules. Kids’ self esteem is precious, you see.
And, because he got an invitation and he sometimes talks to the girl in class, you will, in the end, let him go to another birthday party, thus beginning the cycle all over again.
The gross, gross and grosser.
You will do grosser things than you ever thought you’d do. Ever. Because sometimes there will be a little boy who took his favorite Lightning McQueen car to the potty with him, because Lightning “wanted to watch,” and now he’s sitting in the toilet your boy just went #2 in, and you will have to reach your hand into that stank and pull Lightning back out. Getting a new one just won’t do. Plus, remember the higher utility bills? Yeah, that goes for clogged pipes, too. Close your eyes and fish it out. There’s soap for that. Lots and lots of soap.
You may also be sitting enjoying a lovely dinner with friends when your 18-month-old starts upchucking something that looks like a cross between a cauliflower smoothie and no-butter mashed potatoes, and, rather than let it fall on the floor and make someone else clean it up with their handy mop and bucket, your reflexes will make you catch it. In your hands. Your bare hands. Your bare hands that just stuck a fry in your mouth. (You’ll never see those “friends” again, by the way. They don’t have kids. They don’t understand.)
And you may quite possibly open a door to a poop explosion every other day if you have twins who think it’s funny to take their diapers off and time their bowel movements for the exact moment they’re supposed to be sleeping for naps, and you will have to scrub it off all the cracks they’ve made in their cribs. Don’t worry. There’s soap for that, too.
The energy it takes to keep a house tidy.
It’s not even worth it. They’ll just undo all your work anyway. Hang up their winter jacket on the peg where it goes? In five minutes they’ll decide they want to wear it in the “fall-ish” weather that blew in, bringing temperatures from 125 to 115 degrees. Get their school papers all organized and nice? They’ll want to show you something they made in school today, and it’ll all end up on the floor anyway. Have a place for their shoes? Doesn’t matter. They won’t end up there. Save your energy for others things. Like putting them back in bed four hundred times.
The paradoxical emotions.
There is the one minute where you feel angry enough to strangle your 3-year-old because, for the four billionth time, he marked in a library book while you were watching, just to do it, and then there’s the moment (after ten minutes of cool down and maybe a bottle glass of wine) when he brings you the library book and asks you to read to him, and his eyes are so dang beautiful, and yes, of course you’ll do this for your precious little baby. There’s the second where you want to lock them out of your room forever and ever and ever because they keep coming in to ask questions like “Do penguins have knees” and “Why can’t we have four dogs” and “How did I get out of your body when I was a baby,” and all you know is you want to go to sleep, and then there is that other second where he comes in one more time and you take a deep breath and all he wants is another kiss and hug you don’t often get anymore because he’s getting too big too fast.
There’s the moment when you can’t stand the sight of him because he just ate his brother’s vitamins he knows he’s not supposed to touch (you’ve done this dance half a million times), and then there’s the other moment when you can’t stand how much you love him.
You’ll get used to these moments as a parent.
The torturous road trips.
Soon, going anywhere outside a ten-mile radius of your home will feel like torture. This is mostly because of the question, “Are we almost there?” which will come out of their mouths exactly five minutes after packing in the car. And since you haven’t even left the driveway, you’ll know it’s going to be a really long trip. This question will be asked every other minute for as long as it takes to get you anywhere. So just keep the travel short, if you know what’s best for you. And if this question doesn’t bother you so much, there will be other things. I Spy, for example. And Disney songs. And farts in an enclosed space.
The impossible: Leaving the house.
You’re all dressed and put together and ready to go? All of you at the same time? Well, congratulations, because someone’s about to puke all over himself. You made it out to the car and everyone’s strapped? Someone will say his shoes aren’t actually in the van like he thought, and could you help him find a pair, and you’ll spend the next forty-five minutes looking for the matches to five lone shoes. You’re about to walk out the door on time for once? Someone will discover how to open their Thermos of milk and dump it all over their brother’s backside.
Late just comes with being a parent. Don’t let anyone tell you any different, and don’t let anyone make you feel guilty about it, either. They have no idea what it’s like to leave with neanderthals in tow.
That feeling you get.
No, I’m not talking about the anger or the frustration or the fear that maybe we shouldn’t have done what we did. I mean the overwhelming emotion that hits us every time they’re doing something amazing or wonderful or they say something brilliant or funny or they’re just sitting there doing nothing. It’s that feeling of love that launches us through all these unforeseen challenges.
So I guess if I’m weighing the options, I’d have to say that The Feeling outweighs all the rest.
But ask me again in a few years, when my grocery bill exceeds my housing payment.
This is an excerpt from Parenting is the Hardest Insane Asylum Ever, which does not yet have a release date. For more of Rachel’s humor writings, visit Crash Test Parents.
