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 | 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, and 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 just 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 hand. 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.
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, that is. But I did end up with a busted-up knee. Much better than a busted-up baby.
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 48 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 then 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.
by Rachel Toalson | General Blog
We have this fancy chalkboard hanging in our kitchen with “This Night” written in wannabe hand lettering, because I’m nothing more than a wannabe artist. Beneath those words, we have each of the boys’ names and their subsequent chores listed. Those chores change every week, although if you ask our boys, they’re always on wipe-the-table duty, because it only takes 30 seconds to flick a sponge around and dump food scraps on the floor.
We’re diligent about teaching our boys how to do chores, because one day they will be married, and they need to know how to do things like sweep the floor and load a dishwasher (or whatever nifty invention is around then) and wipe down counters until they’re squeaky clean (no, that’s squeaky clean, kids. Not sticky clean.) so their significant other can take a little break every now and then. Also so we can get a break for the next eighteen years, but that’s not really the point. Okay, it is.
Normally doing the chores looks like the 3-year-old putting the silverware in the dishwasher tray and pouring the liquid soap and closing it and pushing start, but not getting to touch anything else (because glass in 3-year-old hands is like a death sentence. Also, speaking of a death sentence, you should make sure there’s not a butcher knife in the silverware tray, because even if it’s already safe and snug in its place, that 3-year-old will pull it back out. “Not here, Mama. Here,” he’ll say, waving it like he’s writing the ABCs in the air. Except he doesn’t know how to write letters yet. So he’s really just passively aggressively threatening you for all those times you took the plunger away from him even though it’s his favorite toy that’s most definitely not a toy.).
“Doing chores” looks like the other 3-year-old singing while he’s wiping down the table, which really just means he’s sweeping all the leftover food (because boys eat like raccoons) onto the floor the 5-year-old is complaining about sweeping. It looks like a 6-year-old “wiping off counters” by maneuvering the sponge around all the papers they unloaded from their school folders and spread all over the available surface space so there’s really nothing at all to wipe.
And then there is the 8-year-old on trash duty.
When this boy is on trash duty, I regret all the times I talked to him about environmental issues like saving water and recycling everything we can recycle and not wasting energy by leaving lights on. The only thing he heard was…nothing. He read in a book somewhere that most trash can be reused, and this is his mantra:
Everything can be reused. (Because he likes absolutes.)
This mantra is a little overly simple, to my mind. I remind him of this every time he’s brushing his teeth and walks out of the bathroom with the water faucet still running because he’s thinking about how he could reuse his toothbrush and all his brothers’ to make a little toothbrush family with drawn-on faces and homemade clothes and handmade arms and how about we get started right now. I remind him every time I run upstairs before we leave for school and four lights are blazing because he was trying to find that one book to show me what someone made out of old shoes. I remind him every time I throw something away and it ends up back on my bed.
Take, for instance, the baby’s old pacifiers. Pacifiers are pretty gross. These things have been through five boys, and the last baby decided he didn’t like them, so we thought we’d just toss all the old ones. I didn’t really want to give them away because five boys and all that slobber and who in the world would want them? I tossed them all in my bathroom trash can and thought I was done with that.
Imagine my surprise when I wanted to go to bed and there were four pacifiers staring at me from my pillow.
“What in the world?” I said, to no one in particular.
“Oh. Those pacifiers can be reused,” said the 8-year-old, who always seems to be behind me, even if it’s time for lights out.
“I threw them away for a reason,” I said. “I do not want to reuse your old pacifiers.” I then explained that we didn’t want to pass the old pacifiers along to another family when they had already been used by him and four of his brothers, because sometimes people can be a little weird about that kind of thing, since pacifiers go in boys’ mouths and, if the twins have anything to say about it, other unmentionable places.
“Then I’ll take them,” he said. He held out his hand.
“I don’t want old pacifiers all over the place. We’re already fighting a losing battle with tidying up,” I said, because I’m a positive person like that. “And we’re not having any other babies.”
“I know,” my boy said. “But I can use them to make something.”
And he did. He made a pacifier yo-yo that lasted all of three days before he got tired of playing with it.
When the environmentalist is on trash duty, we can’t throw anything away. The leftover food scraps can always be used to feed the birds out back. The plastic strawberry cartons can be used to hold cloth napkins and keep random things organized (just get out of my house, random things. I don’t even want you here.). The old socks with holes in them can be reused for cleaning cloths—except they’re my infant’s socks that the 3-year-olds cut holes in and are about as big as my thumb.
I’ve come up to my room to find old makeup boxes and papers I no longer need and soap-scummed shampoo bottles lying on my bed because he thinks I can “find a way to reuse them if I just think hard enough.” Problem is, I don’t really have much of a brain left to think outside the box, because children are like zombies except way cuter, so you don’t suspect that all they really want to do is eat your brain out.
I know I should be glad he cares. But when you’re slipping into bed and find an old pair of mangled underwear because he saw it in your trash can and decided you probably needed it and didn’t really mean to throw it away, and you know exactly what the skivvies were touching in the trash, I think it’s time to close up the environmentalist shop.
But the thing is, I don’t want to squash that spirit. Because the way he can so clearly see something new out of something old is a great quality to have. It doesn’t happen for all of us, and many of us lose that ability, anyway, when we become practical adults and too much stuff is a very real thing. Right now, he loves seeing what he can do to create something new and fun out of something old and worn. This is valuable experience he’s getting with play and invention and creativity. I don’t want to discourage that.
I also don’t want to try to imagine what I could possibly do with my Physician’s Formula organic mascara container that you’d never be able to clean out. Just get rid of it, son. Trust me. That thing will start smelling worse than your feet in six months.
So we’ve reached a compromise. As long as his reclaimed items have a place, he can keep them. As long I’ve put something in the trash, he’s not allowed to put it back on my bed with his “imagine what else it could be” challenge.
It’s working, for now. At least until the next time I throw away a pair of blown-out soles shoes and he decides we can probably figure out a way to use all that rubber for something like a homemade Honda Odyssey tire. Which is just around the corner, I’m sure.
by Rachel Toalson | General Blog
Husband and I used to be in a band. Well, we technically 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 just 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 12 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 don’t even have anything started. There’s a line of kids wanting just 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 wealth.
Another shallow one, I know. But we had dreams, you see. We would make the big bucks with just our music. Who gets to make the big bucks doing what they love? And we would use those big bucks to build schools for orphaned children and dig wells for the people who don’t have access to clean water, and after all that, we’d use the leftover funds for dinners out when we didn’t feel like cooking and a house with as many rooms as we needed and expensive parties.
I guess this one looks like my life today, too, because when I don’t feel like cooking there’s always a picnic dinner out at the park that we’ll pack ourselves (but it’s still not cooking!) and a house with…enough rooms and birthday parties at home with twenty 6-year-olds running wild on cake and cookies and lavender tea that’s supposed to balance those effects but doesn’t (expensive parties in terms of energy. They cost days.).
Being a rockstar used to mean writing original songs.
We dreamed of writing a new song every week and sharing it with the world. We dreamed of changing lives with our melodies. We dreamed of hearing those songs on the radio and imagining others singing along.
We still write original songs. It’s just that they’re mostly about farts and poop and cleaning too much earwax out of an ear. Everything a boy thinks is hilarious, but at least we’ve got our adoring (or laughing) fans. You won’t hear them on the radio, but you will hear them in stereo sound when you come for a visit.
Being a rockstar used to mean practicing a whole song without a kid interruption.
We used to be able to practice for two hours, uninterrupted, song after song after song, and this made us really, really good. We could take our time and run the parts that gave us trouble last week and perfect every song before we shared it with the world.
And I guess if you’re getting all technical we can still practice a song, or thirty seconds of it, give or take a few, without a kid interruption, and you do get really good at accommodating this sort of thing when you have kids. Husband and I can keep a conversation going for an entire day, even with ten thousand five-minute interruptions. We can even maintain it when the interruptions are things like “Why is my poop lime green” and “What happens when a bird crashes into the window, because one just did” and “I just answered the door and one of the twins ran out with a man I don’t know.” It’s quite a skill. So thanks, kids, for that valuable gift.
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 some more. 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 anywhere, 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 way 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 to them.
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 chose them in the first place; 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.
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 decide we were ready to start 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 they will be a willful 3-year-old. And then they’ll be a spirited 8-year-old. And then they’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 up. 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 a cute little sweater vest that would be perfect for the first family portraits.
I think about them now. Every time I get a utility bill in the mail or shop for groceries or just try to leave the house.
What you don’t think about is that when your baby becomes a kid, there’s
1. The much higher utility bills.
You won’t notice this one right away. This will actually happen when 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. 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 and 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 time asking, and it will run all night, because you were just 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 turns on the hose, 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 because a sprinkler has busted (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 just turn them all off and Little House on the Prairie it.
2. 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.)
3. The fact that bouncing off the walls is a real thing.
You will watch them do it after attending their friends’ birthday parties. You’ll see the evidence in wall nicks and holes their hands accidentally made when they ran into it too hard, and you’ll make a mental note to fix it, 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 25 students have birthdays, and they have to invite everyone in their class. And you will let him go, again.
4. 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. Just 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.
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.
5. 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 just decide they want to wear it in the “fallish” weather that just blew in, bringing temperatures from 125 to 115 degrees. Get their school papers all organized and nice? They’ll just 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. Just save your energy for other things. Like putting them back in bed four hundred times after lights out.
6. The paradoxical emotions.
There is the one minute where you feel angry enough to strangle your 3-year-old because he just, for the four billionth time, marked in a library book while you were watching, just to do it, and then there’s the moment (after 10 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 just 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 because you’ve done this dance half a million times, and then there’s the other moment when you just can’t stand how much you love him.
You’ll get used to these moments as a parent.
7. The torturous road trips.
Soon, going anywhere outside a 10-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 it 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.
8. 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 your neanderthals in tow.
9. 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 is like a second mortgage.
by Rachel Toalson | General Blog
We’ve been working on manners in our house. This might seem like a losing battle with a bunch of boys who think it’s hilarious to arm-fart while they’re covering their mouth coughing, but nobody ever said I wasn’t up for a challenge. I am the only female in a household of seven males, after all. Challenge accepted.
By far the rudest people in my house are my 3-year-old twins.
They make demands, no matter how many times we tell them we’re not demand-givers. They brutally tell the truth (“Are you having another baby, Mama?” No, little devil sweet boy, that’s just the after-pregnancy pooch. Seven months later.). They pick up words from their older brothers and try to use them in sentences that don’t make sense (“I need very literally to the potty.” What does that even mean, son?). They love the word NO, in all caps. They have their own opinions about what they think should happen, and it’s not ever what you think should happen. Never.
If you have the great privilege of living with or caring for a 3-year-old on a daily basis, you’re probably very familiar with the following:
Me: Please put your shoes on. We need to take your brothers to school.
3-year-old: NO!
Me: Yes.
3-year-old: But I too tired.
Me: Okay. You can stay here and go to bed.
3-year-old: Actually I hungry.
Me: You just ate three eggs and a two pancakes. There’s nothing left.
3-year-old: But I firsty.
Me: You can get a drink at the water fountain after we drop your brothers off.
3-year-old: But there are crayons on the floor.
Me: I’m getting tired of your buts.
3-year-old: Mama! You said butt!
Me: Just get your shoes on.
3-year-old: NO!
On and on and on it goes, until I’m carrying a screaming child out of the house at 7:15 in the morning (sorry again, neighbors) because he wanted to put on his shoes himself and I had to do it.
It’s like talking to a completely incompetent human being. Oh, wait. Silly me. It’s not like. It is. BECAUSE 3-YEAR-OLDS ARE COMPLETELY INCOMPETENT HUMAN BEINGS.
You see, 3-year-olds aren’t all that great at remembering that there are other people in the world. They don’t really want to know how else anything is done besides the way they want to do it.
Me: You have to pull the tongue of the shoe out, you see? Your shoe magically fits now.
3-year-old (starting over): No! That’s not how you do it!
They can’t really compute that not everything in the world is going to go their way.
3-year-old: I want the purple plate. (Gets the blue plate, because a purple plate doesn’t even exist. Cries for the next half hour because of a plate that doesn’t exist).
They don’t know how to learn from their mistakes.
Me: Sit down. I don’t want you to fall.
(3-year-old stays standing and falls out of his chair, out of his brother’s chair and face first onto the hard tile floor. Console him and make sure he isn’t really hurt.)
Me: See. That wouldn’t have happened if you had been sitting down. Now get back in your seat and sit down on your bottom.
(Turn around to cut the last strawberries. Turn back around to see 3-year-old still standing in almost the exact position he was before, except this time he’s dancing on one foot).
I’ve discovered that finding humor in the speech mess-ups my 3-year-olds make is one of the only things that keeps me from walking out on them when they’re fighting for 45 minutes about whether the exact same Lightning McQueen cars are the dark red Lightning McQueen or the light red Lightning McQueen. (The answer is neither. They’re the EXACT SAME CAR.)
So I’ve made this handy little list so I can remember and laugh and find my way back into thanks for these two 3-year-olds who fill my house with mayhem laughter.
1. Demands.
These can sound calm, like a simple, “Get me some milk” or “I need my shoes” or “I want a peach.” Or they can come from a belligerent 3-year-old who’s been taught the correct way to ask but just won’t, because 3-year-olds.
3-year-old: Get me some milk.
Me: …
3-year-old: I firsty.
Me: Nice to meet you, firsty.
3-year-old: Get me some milk, Mama. (A little louder this time)
Me: I don’t do anything for boys who demand.
3-year-old: I NEED MILK!
Me: Not when you ask like that.
3-year-old: GET ME MILK, MAMA!
I can play this game all day, because it usually happens at dinner and I’ve got my wine.
2. Buts.
I have some strong-willed 3-year-olds, and I hear a whole lot of buts.
Me: It’s time to brush your teeth.
3-year-old: But I not finished playing.
Me: I know it’s hard to quit playing. Right now it’s time to brush your teeth.
3-year-old: But we dinnent eat durnner.
Me: Yes we did. You had five pieces of pizza.
3-year-old: But we dinnent get to play.
Me: What are you doing right now?
3-year-old:
Me:
3-year-old: But I need a drink.
Me: Go brush your teeth.
Other 3-year-old (eats half the toothpaste while I’m occupied with his twin brother.)
There are also the buts that don’t make sense.
Me: It’s time to go upstairs, where you’re supposed to be.
3-year-old: But my cup is itchy.
Something tells me I don’t want to know what that means.
Me: Please don’t leave the door open.
3-year-old: But my eyes are tired.
Me: Don’t chew on your shoes. It’s really gross.
3-year-old: But my legs are itchy.
I wonder why. *Shudder*
3. Completely wrong words.
My twins have great vocabularies. The problem is, they haven’t really paid attention to the context in which those words are used. So their tries sound something like this:
3-year-old: I dinnent do my hisand today.
Me: You didn’t what?
3-year-old: I dinnent do my hisand today.
Me: I have no idea what you’re saying. Do we have an interpreter available?
3-year-old: I DINNENT DO MY HISAND TODAY.
8-year-old: He’s saying he didn’t do his highs and lows today.
Good thing there are older brothers.
3-year-old: I sweatering really bad.
Me: You’re what?
3-year-old: I sweatering really bad.
Me: You mean you’re sweating?
3-year-old: Yeah. I sweatering.
So close.
3-year-old: I have to very poo poo.
Me: …
4. Consonants are hard.
Consonants are not the friends of 3-year-olds in certain instances. Those certain instances would be words like “costume,” which will become “cossayume;” “actually,” which will become “ashaley;” and “shirt,” which will become “shit” (You’ll want to have a video camera trained on the kid who does this. You may even want to make a Christmas video with the kid saying, “Oh, shirt! Merry Christmas!” and send it to all your friends and family, which we definitely did not do. I’m just throwing out ideas here.)
For all their arguing and mispronouncing and demanding, 3-year-olds can be a-holes truly delightful little people. I’m really glad I have two of them, and I’m not looking forward to their fourth birthday at all, because, dang, I just want them to stay 3 forever and ever and ever.
I’ll just say what all the other parents of 3-year-olds are thinking: Sometimes it’s a good thing time marches on.
