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.
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.
Our 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 dust 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.).
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 at the same time.)
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 regimen.
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.
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
All of us have our shortcomings. That’s for sure. No one is perfect, after all.
For all the shortcomings I notice about myself (and there are a lot, let me tell you), probably about 80 percent of them are true, because I’m a child of divorce and suffer from self-esteem issues and blah blah blah, I don’t want to bore you.
But this amazing thing happened when I became a parent. All of those shortcomings disappeared. That 80 percent dropped to zero percent.
How did I make that happen? Well, that’s easy. I just blame everything on the kids.
Like…
The smells.
Every now and again, I’ll be in the store, perusing the aisles like any other shopper, except I’ll suddenly inhale and realize my nose hairs are singed. “Oh my gosh,” I’ll say, loudly. “Did one of you toot?” The boys will look at me and laugh, because just the IDEA of a toot makes boys laugh, even if none of them claims it. They don’t claim it because it was me. But the other shoppers don’t know that. So I innocently continue on, cropdusting through the produce section, the healthy living section, the dairy section and then on toward the checkout counter. Next time I’ll think twice before I gorge on hummus and then head to the store. Lucky I had my kids with me.
There are other smells I blame on my kids, but these are legit. Like how my house smells like a swamp because boys are really bad at aiming, and, apparently, flushing. Like how my backyard smells like a gas tank, because my 4-year-olds managed to pick the lock on the shed out back and dump the lawnmower’s gas supply out all over themselves and the grass so we could all go out in a blaze of glory (this isn’t the first time, either. There is no place that isn’t dangerous when you have twins.). Like the sour milk/mildew/fart/dirty sock smell that wafts out into the world every time we open our van doors because, well, boys. It’s like the air freshener you always wanted in your Honda Odyssey, one that tells the story of a family. I know I’ll miss it when it’s gone. Which is a good thing, because it never is.
The state of our house.
The reason our house looks like a paper supply manufacturer blew up in it is because my kids enjoy creating colorful forts out of construction paper when they’re supposed to be in bed and Husband and I have already fallen asleep. It has nothing to do with the fact that I’m too lazy to get a trash bag out and sweep it all into a dump. It also has nothing to do with the fact that I might have heard them out of their beds last night but I was too exhausted to go check. All those papers? They make great sliders when I’m lifting weights, so win win.
My kids are also the reason everything in my house is broken. The coffee maker didn’t actually explode because I poured water in the wrong slot. It exploded because my kid rigged it to break when I wasn’t looking. The toilet didn’t stop flushing because Husband took a massive sit-down and used a whole roll of toilet paper. It stopped flushing because one of the 4-year-old twins looked at it. That hole in the wall did not appear because I accidentally threw a shoe toward the shoe basket and missed by about 500 yards. It appeared because boys weakened the drywall by touching it.
The door won’t open all the way? The fan is missing a blade? The kitchen chair collapsed when I sat in it? Come on, kids.
The state of my yard.
Kids are the reason we hardly ever get around to mowing our yard. Do you know how hard it is to muster up the energy to pick up all the crap kids leave outside and know there’s still something else you have to do? (I suspect you do know, if you’re a parent.) So after you’ve spent three hours playing “search and find all the Hot Wheels” because your backyard turned into a wilderness, you’re supposed to mow and weed eat and edge? No thanks. My ugly yard is the fault of my kids.
And not just the overgrown grass and the tree-weeds and the rose bushes that reach for you when you knock on our door. Also the holes you’ll trip in when you’re trying to play that Search and Find game in the backyard. My kids are using table spoons to dig a hole to the earth’s core. I know, because they told me. Also, I fell in the hole, and Husband had to pull me out with a rope. I think they’re almost there.
Being late.
It doesn’t matter how early we get up to go somewhere or how prepared we are for the day, shoes lined up just so, outfits picked out, breakfast already in the refrigerator, waiting to be warmed. We’re going to get in the car at least fifteen minutes late—and that’s a good day. All the boys could have every single bag in the world packed, and they would still remember something they need to “go back inside” to find. Someone will have to go pee. Someone else will spill their water all over themselves and scream until they get a change of clothes, because they don’t want to “wear wet underwear all day!” Someone else will squeeze out a fart and accidentally shart.
Kids make parents late. Don’t worry. You’ll never remember how to get anywhere on time once you’ve been through the circus kids perform on the way out the door. So just sit back and relax and blame it on the kids while you can.
The rapid deterioration of my brain.
I used to be able to hold my own in the intelligence department. I don’t say that to brag. I knew what the square root of sixty-four was. I knew what three times forty-seven was without using a calculator. I knew what entropy was an how it was explained using physics (though I never truly understood its potency until I had kids). Now? My kids ask me how many pieces of pizza Suzy had if there was pizza with thirteen pieces and Margie had three of those pieces and Terrance had fifteen. I get all nervous, because I DON’T KNOW. I don’t know how to solve their math anymore. I aced college algebra, but I can’t do a second-grade math problem.
While we’re on the subject, here’s some math for you. I had a whole brain. I had six kids. Each of those six kids got a piece of the brain. How much of my brain is left?
The answer is not much.
The stains on my shirt.
No, I’m not a messy eater. I just have kids who like to touch me with food on their hands.
You’ll never actually know if this is true or not, because I’ve sworn Husband to secrecy. Only the two of us will know that the last time we went out on a date (which I can hardly remember, it was so long ago), I dropped jalepeno ranch dip all down the front-side of my shirt, and there was no kid within fifteen miles of that restaurant. Only the two of us will know that when we swung by the froyo place for a tasty treat, we ate it in the car, and when I turned on the light to check my face, there was a string of chocolate ice cream clinging to my shoulder (I’m pretty sure Husband flung it in his excitement to shovel a mouthful in his piehole). No one will know that when I’m huddled in my pantry, eating a handful of chocolate chips Husband hasn’t found yet, I’ll end up with the evidence on my thighs. The shorts that cover my thighs, that is. I mean, on the thighs, too. A moment on the lips, forever on the hips. Who cares?
Going to a Fresh Beat Band concert.
I only bought tickets because I have kids. It’s not because I think the Fresh Beat Band is the coolest kids band ever and every time one of their songs comes on I just want to break out dancing. (Well, so what if that’s true?)
If you see me playing with the build-a-house blocks at the San Antonio Children’s Museum, it’s because of the kids. If you see me dressing up like a royal queen in a too-short cape at the Witte Museum, it’s because of the kids. If you see me playing with Legos and building a Star Wars Desert Outpost, it’s because of the kids.
I’m realizing here that you can pretty much blame anything on kids. You want to be perfect? All you need is someone to blame everything on. Which makes you a perfect candidate for becoming a parent.
Seriously, though, the truth of the matter is that we all make mistakes. We all have imperfections. Who am I to hold you in judgement? Who are you to hold me in judgement? We’re all just doing the best we can, so we should embrace our mistakes.
Because as long as we have kids, we can blame EVERYTHING on them. Now. Go live it up and do some blaming.
by Rachel Toalson | General Blog
Parenting is simpler than ever in our day and age. So much advice exists that you can’t really go wrong, even if you tried. All you have to do is:
1. Make sure your kids can do their homework themselves, because they’ll need to be able to apply for a job someday.
2. But also make sure they know you’re there if they need an answer or two on that project due tomorrow—kids feel abandoned when we don’t help.
3. Make sure they get ample time to play, because play is how they learn.
4. But also make sure you take some of their free time away to teach them how to tie their shoes and read and write their names and complete sentences before they go to kindergarten, even though when we were in kindergarten it was all fun and games and mostly coloring (it’s a different world now).
5. Just don’t take too much play time away. And don’t let them play all the time. Because they need to know their letters. And how to tie their shoes. And how to write their names and sentences.
6. Make sure you teach your kids how to handle technology responsibly, because there’s a whole different world they can discover on the Internet, and it’s not pretty.
7. Make sure you let them explore technology, though, because how will they ever learn how to be brilliant computer programmers if they never get to explore?
8. Make sure you teach them how to use their phones properly—not while they’re driving, especially—and make sure they know it’s not appropriate to text dirty pictures to anyone, and make sure you’re keeping tabs on all their social profiles so you can confirm they’re not Internet bullying.
9. But make sure you don’t invade their privacy. Kids hate that.
10. Make sure you help them understand the importance of good grades and going to school every day, without a break, ever, and that perfect attendance is the best award you could ever get, because this is teaching commitment.
11. But make sure they also understand that grades aren’t everything, and, also, it’s important to take time off.
12. Make sure you help your kids know that you’re a parent who will always be available, even though the pressures in your job are mounting and the economy’s not stellar and your raise in income doesn’t really even cover the inflation costs of last year so now you’re working harder than ever.
13. But make sure your kids also know that work takes commitment, because you don’t want them thinking it’s all fun and games.
14. Make sure they don’t see you worry about money, because then they’ll have a bad relationship with money.
15. But make sure they don’t use money too irresponsibly, either, because you don’t want your kids to end back up on your couch.
16. Make sure you don’t let your kids know that they’re good at something, because then they’ll feel the need to be the best at everything, and they’ll seek approval and try to impress by the things they do instead of the people they are.
17. But make sure you don’t just leave them out to dry when they seek your approval.
18. Make sure they don’t have a deflated sense of self, because that kind of thing is paralyzing.
19. But also make sure they don’t have an inflated sense of self, which is just annoying.
20. Make sure you give every kid an award for something, because kids are fragile, you know, and we wouldn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings.
21. But make sure they don’t all get an award, because you don’t want kids dependent on awards for trying.
22. Make sure your kids know how to be kind.
23. But also make sure that they know how to stand up for themselves.
24. Make sure they can identify and name the bullies.
25. But make sure they love the bullies, too.
26. Make sure your kids understand that it’s a good thing to be bored.
27. But don’t ever let your kids get bored, especially when you’re in a restaurant, where they might disturb other people out to eat with their hard-earned money, or if you’re at the doctor’s office, where they’ll never be able to find something to occupy their imagination, or especially if they’re at home, because kids underfoot. I don’t even have to finish that sentence.
28. Make sure you have all sorts of enrichment toys for them to play with so they’ll stay out of trouble and learn enough to stay ahead of their peers.
29. But don’t give them too many toys, because kids feel overwhelmed when faced with too many choices.
30. Make sure you get your kids in the gifted class (those enrichment toys will help!) so they’ll be challenged in the best possible ways.
31. But make sure they’re not aware that they’re different—special, even—because kids’ egos are a little flimsy, and they could feel sad that they’re different, or they could feel superior, which is slightly worse.
32. Make sure you feed them healthy food and teach them about organic and nonorganic, GMO and non-GMO, because you know the grocery store is like a death trap waiting to spring.
33. But make sure they have enough opportunities to eat like their peers, because everyone knows that a kid who doesn’t get to eat the donuts someone brought to school for a birthday party is a kid who will feel left out. We can’t let kids feel left out.
34. Make sure your kids know how to be independent.
35. But make sure they’re not too independent.
36. Make sure you protect their self-esteem.
37. But make sure they don’t have too much self-esteem, whatever that means.
38. Make sure they believe they deserve the life of their choosing.
39. But make sure they don’t feel entitled to anything.
There are so many things we’re expected to teach our children. So many paradoxes to parenting. So many people trying to tell us how to do it.
Maybe we can just take a deep breath for a minute. Maybe we can let a little of the pressure off. Maybe we can just let it be.
Maybe. But don’t forget that you can’t take too much time for yourself, because that would be unfair to the kids. But also make sure you’re getting enough rest. You don’t want to burn yourself out. You’ll need you strength, your sound mind, because parenting is hard. But also super easy.
You’ll never be confused. Always, probably.
This is an excerpt from Hills I’ll Probably Just Lie Down On, a humor book that does not yet have a release date. To read more of my humor essays, visit Crash Test Parents.
