by Rachel Toalson | General Blog
There are some great inventions out on the market today that have made my life easier. We don’t always have the funds to invest in something new and wonderful, but when we do, watch out. A crockpot? Yep, made life easier AND my kids actually get dinner now (there is a Before Crockpot life and an After Crockpot life, and let me tell you, the After Crockpot life is much better). The Internet? Hey, that’s Husband’s livelihood, so I sure am glad for that. An app for tracking my last period? I don’t know who I’d be without that one.
But there are still some gaping holes in the make-life-easier, especially when it comes to parents. I would like the inventors to get on these asap (and you’re welcome for the ideas).
1. Divider glass between the front seat and the back seats.
I own a minivan. It’s the only vehicle large enough to hold my six kids, but it is not a vehicle large enough to make ignoring them a possibility. Every time we load up to take a trip, even if it’s to the grocery store ten minutes down the road, the first question we hear, before we pull out of the drive, is “Are we almost there?” If we happen to be traveling farther than fifteen minutes up the road, we’re in for a very long trip with billions of opportunities to exercise our patience. I’m tired, I’m hungry, I’m bored, my back hurts, I dropped my pencil, you made my book fall, he hit me, he’s copying me, he’s laying on me, he’s touching me, he’s looking at me, are we almost there, are we almost there, are we almost there?
I don’t want billions of opportunities to exercise my patience. I would like a glass divider between my seat and theirs so that when things get out of hand, all I have to do is touch a button, wave in the rearview and say, “You’re on your own now, kids.”
2. A cone of silence to put over my face.
Let me just tell you, this would have to be a really strong cone of silence. My kids speak at an average of 3,000 decibels. I am an introvert who, by dinnertime, has had it with the noise six boys can create. I would put on this handy cone when they’re losing their minds about is dinner ready they’re really hungry they’re starving I’m such a mean mom I won’t let them have a snack two minutes before dinner no they haven’t had forty snacks I’m not remembering correctly. I would put it on my face when the 9-year-old starts talking about Pokemon. I would put it on my face when the twins figure out another way to scale the wall and get to their clothes in the closet so they don’t hear what I have to say about the way their closet is now, for the twelfth time this week, all over their floor.
I don’t even care what this looks like. It could look like a giant black spider for all I care (I’ll make that sacrifice). In fact, that might be better. Then I’ll have extra protection, because the kids would be too afraid to come near.
On second thought, maybe I just need a mute button.
3. An invisibility cloak.
This, of course, would be for those moments when the baby is down and ready to go to sleep, even closing his eyes, but the moment he spots you, the whole world is ending and you’re going to have to pick him up, because he’ll cry for 32 hours straight. But an invisibility cloak would also help us smuggle restaurant food into the bedroom when the kids are supposed to be asleep (there would be an extra feature to neutralize the smell of chips and queso and the medium well burger). It would also help a parent successfully sneak out of the house to get a minute to themselves without someone following them, whining at them, asking for something, like another orange or the answer to 147 times 89 or the miracle of turning back time.
4. Toilet paper rolls that have a lock and key.
This would save me considerable money. My 3-year-old twins, you see, are really, really good at experiments like “What happens when you throw a whole roll of toilet paper in the toilet I just peed in?” They do it about every other day. They think it’s funny to watch the edges of the paper curl and the way white caves in on itself. It’s not funny. These experiments cost me an average of $15 a month. For the mathematically impaired, that’s $180 a year. That would pay for my electricity bill any month that’s not part of a Texas summer (there aren’t many).
I would like a toilet paper dispenser that’s not afraid to stand up against 3-year-old hands, please.
5. A magic pill that makes a kid feel full.
I am telling you, boys are something else. They can eat a whole pound of strawberries, and they’re still hungry. They can eat twelve bananas and they’re still hungry. They can stuff an entire loaf of bread in their mouth, along with a stick of butter, and they will still be hungry. A pill that could tell them they’re actually just bored would be fantastic.
6. A mobile shoe-tracking app.
I would love to download an app onto my phone that would tell me where every right shoe the 5-year-old owns is hiding, because this is getting a little ridiculous. He wasn’t born with two left feet, but looking at his shoe basket, you would think someone thought it would be funny to put us in an episode of Punk’d: What Happens When All the Right Shoes Disappear. Every morning he’s supposed to be getting ready for school, and it’s the same old story. Only left shoes for every pair of shoes he owns. Can’t find the other one. I spend hours of my life looking for this right shoe and finding it only so it can get lost again.
No, Apple, there’s not an app for everything. This is a giant hole in the app world. Somebody needs to get on this. I would, but I don’t really have what’s called an “inventing mind.” In fact, I don’t really know where my mind is now that I have kids. It’s certainly not where it used to be—or what it used to be.
I guess that’s why all these inventions-that-haven’t-been-invented-yet all seem so brilliant.
Let me know when these inventions are available. I’ll be the first in line to buy…if I’m not already brain-dead from the effort of raising six boys without them.
by Rachel Toalson | General Blog
Every now and then, I reach this mysterious place where parenting feels really easy. The boys are behaving perfectly (as if that’s the measure of easy parenting), and everyone is loving each other well and, most importantly, no one is complaining about what I just put on the table for dinner before they’ve even tasted it. We are all a happy family. I like them. They like me.
It doesn’t happen often, but when it does, watch out. They wake up different people the next day, and I find I’ve told myself a whole parcel of lies like this one:
I have really easy kids because I’m a really good parent.
Fortunately, this one gets knocked off-kilter quite regularly by my oldest, who is a practiced diplomat who never lets an answer stay an answer until he’s rolled it all over on the ground and wrestled it to near death.
After nine years of parenting this kid, I know better than to believe this lie. I don’t have really easy kids because I’m a really good parent. I have really easy kids because they were born easy. I have a few of those in the mix, and they’re delightful. They’re also easily forgotten, because they don’t require as much work. I could leave the 6-year-old home all day alone, and the only thing I’ve have to worry about is the state of the refrigerator when I get back (this kid once ate three pounds of red grapes when I raced upstairs to take a record-breaking shower). The others, well. They’ll argue with a sock, if it told them them to put it on.
There are a lot of other lies we tell ourselves, too. Like:
It’s going to get easier.
This is your lifeline when you’re the parents of twins. You spend the first year telling yourself it’s going to get easier, because they’ll be able to feed themselves, and then you spend the next year saying it’ll get easier when they’re 3, because they’ll understand things like “Don’t take the cover off that baby-proofed light socket. It will kill you,” and then you spend the whole third year dying, because you have not known fear until you see 3-year-old twins with their guilty faces on standing outside a bathroom door they just closed, saying they did “Nuffing.”
Crap. It’s not ever going to get easier. I’m just going to tell myself that, and then maybe I’ll be pleasantly surprised (but probably not).
The other day I found myself thinking of another lie while I was scrubbing the dish that had somebody’s sour ranch dressing caked on it.
Eventually they’ll do the chores to my standards.
Eventually they’ll do the chores, that much is true. But it will probably not be up to my standards. I know, because I remember myself as a child. My mom had a rotating dish schedule, and after my shift, the sink was always splattered with water, and my mom told me over and over and over again that part of the dishwasher’s job was wiping up all the excess water, but yeah, yeah, I just wanted to get on to the part where I got to sit on the couch and read a book. They didn’t have streamed audio books back then. If they had, it would have been a different story, Mom.
And then, the other night, when I’d finished a dinner of sautéed pork chops with mushrooms and garlic sliced infinitesimally small so no one would complain about the unknown grossness caking their otherwise perfect meat, somebody, before he’d even tasted it, said he didn’t like what we were having and he wasn’t going to eat, and I discovered another big, fat lie.
One day they’ll stop complaining.
It’s a lie, too. I know, because the other day, when something was taking too long on my computer I started complaining about how you’d think we’d have faster computers in this century and how it was taking SO MUCH TIME and how I didn’t have all this extra time at my disposal and how I wished I could jut hire someone to do this part and blah blah blah blah blah.
The only way my kids will stop complaining is if I magically somehow stop complaining, which is probably not going to happen anytime soon, because have you seen the mess kids can make in two seconds of inattention? Complaining is my feel-better.
On Christmas morning this year, I found myself agreeing with the lie flipping through my head when my kids emptied their stockings and asked to eat a peanut butter cup.
It’s just a little sugar. Just this once.
“Just a little sugar” is like saying, “It’s just a few broken pieces of furniture and a few more holes in the wall and a few whiny kids at the end of this day. Giving kids sugar is like rubbing yourself with raw meat and walking out into the African bush. You’re going to die.
And, of course, we decided to have our first Family Fun Day on the first day of the new year, because our word for this year is “play,” and we wanted to end the boys’ Christmas vacation on a good note, on a day when we would all be able to enjoy each other and play, and twenty minutes into that day I found another lie sneaking in, like maybe I wasn’t paying attention:
One day it’ll take us less than 30 minutes to pack up and get in the car.
It seems like it’s taken longer the older the boys get, mostly because now they have wills of their own. There is always another shoe to be found. There is always a drink someone forgot. There is always something they need to “pack up real quick” because they want to take a billion art supplies to the zoo.
Another lie that happens to me often, when I’m posting a picture of my boys and I’m disappointed that only 157 people liked it is:
Everybody thinks our kids are as adorable as we think they are.
Nope. People think kids are cute, generally, but no one thinks they’re as cute as we do (except twins—other people think they’re cuter than they really are.). I’m speaking generally, of course. That’s not the case for my boys. Everyone in the world thinks they’re cute.
Some lies knock us right off our parenting pedestal, like this one:
Not giving in to bad behavior makes bad behavior magically disappear.
I remember the first time this illusion was shattered, when my oldest threw a major fit because he wanted the green plate instead of the blue one. But the blue plate was the only one clean. And thus began the oft repeated phrase in our home, “You get what you get, and you don’t throw a fit.” I didn’t give in. Of course not. That meant the tantrums would go away.
Not what happened. In fact, I suspect he tried harder. And I stuck to my boundary harder. And we danced again the next time. And the next time and the next time. Now he’s 9. We don’t fight about the green plate instead of the blue plate anymore. We fight about things like how he needs five more minutes of technology time to finish this one thing, even though his time’s up.
Not giving in never solved anything in my house.
Every now and then, when a kid is talking about how they want to run away and how they wish they had different parents, I find myself thinking:
One day they’ll understand.
One day they’ll understand the boundaries we set, and one day they’ll understand why we said no, their friend can’t come over today because we want to spend some time together as a family, and one day they’ll understand why we limit that technology time and require creative time every day. But even if they don’t, that doesn’t change the fact that:
One day they will know just how much they were loved.
I’ve gone over and over this one, examined it inside and out, and I’ve come to the conclusion that this one is not a lie. They may not understand the love of it all right now, but one day they will. I’m certain of it.
Now, excuse me while I go fish out of the toilet a stuffed animal that wanted to “take a mud bath” in the present someone forgot to flush. It’s going to get easier.
by Rachel Toalson | General Blog
We all make wishes and we all have dreams. It’s the most hopeful part of the human condition, to wish and dream. But when those wishes and dreams land in the hands of children, well, we have a different animal entirely.
My kids make wishes and dreams all the time. But do they make sense? Are they noble? Would they change the state of the world, for the better, I mean? Meh. It’s arguable.
If the dreams of my children came true, we would all weigh one thousand pounds.
This is because one of the recurring dreams of my children is to live in a world where breakfast is chocolate and lunch is chocolate and their afternoon snack is chocolate and dinner is chocolate and their nighttime nibble is chocolate. In their world, every meal, every drink, every single thing on earth would be made of chocolate. Now. I’m not saying I wouldn’t like to live in this fantasy world, too, but I also happen to care about a little thing called health, and if all my kids eat is chocolate, the top floor of our house will no longer hold us. Also, have you seen my kids on sugar? No thanks. Find a kid on sugar and you find a parent far too close to crazy. Give my kids limitless chocolate and they’ll pull me right over the edge of madness, and I’d rather believe I have at least a small grip on sanity still. (It’s highly improbable, I know. I do have six kids.)
If the dreams of my children came true, they would own all the things.
It’s appalling how many things my kids want. You’d think we had taught them better than this, but, alas, it seems they have not learned the lesson of “be grateful for what you already have, because there are children starving in other countries.” If one were to ask them what they dream of most, you would hear things like “All the newest Beanie Boos” or “All the Pokemon cards in the whole world” (If you haven’t had the pleasure of being introduced to Pokemon, allow me to say you are really missing out. There are more than a billion of these cards in existence, and if it were up to my 9-year-old, he would own them all.) or “Legoland right in our house.” While it would be wildly impressive to live in a house completely made of LEGOs, I’m not quite sure that any kind of living structure made of plastic would even remotely stand up to the abuse of six boys. Also, Pokemon cards.
If the dreams of my children came true, the only music we would ever listen to is Kidz Bop or Minecraft music (Take popular songs! Add Minecraft lyrics! It’s delightful!).
If we tried listening to our 1990s Pandora station, which the 9-year-old calls “the worst music ever. It’s so bad it’s killing my ears,” all systems would shut down. And if all we listened to was Minecraft music all the time, I can guarantee I’d become one of those zombies you’re supposed to kill. Might as well shoot me now.
If the dreams of my children came true, they would never have homework.
Huh. You know what? That’s one of my dreams, too.
If the dreams of my children came true, the 3-year-olds would be allowed to do everything and anything for themselves.
This means it would take fifteen years to leave the house, because not only would we have to wait for them to button their jeans but we’d also be waiting for them to figure out how to turn the sleeves of their jackets right side out. They would be allowed to cross streets on their own and run through parking lots without holding a parent’s hand and ride the elevator whenever they chose, because they wouldn’t have the annoying rule about “staying within sight.” They would be allowed to jump in the river after the bread they just threw at the ducks, and they would be allowed to chase geese down a hill where a whole flock of them is waiting and they would be allowed to climb over the rails at the zoo so they could go wading with the black bear. They would, essentially, be able to kill themselves at will.
If the dreams of my children came true, they would be able to use some kind of screen all hours of the day, every day.
They would be able to watch so many hours of the boob tube that their brains would cave in. They would be able to play video games until their brains start frying in the oil of inactivity and overstimulation (“This is your brain. This is your brain on screens.”). They would be able dive into their phones without talking to anyone around them for years.
On second thought, that sounds almost…nice. Hang on while I rethink this one.
If the dreams of my children came true, we would never have such things as naps and quiet time and, God help us, bedtime.
There would never be such things as naps or quiet time, because children like to squeeze as much good out of a day as they can. Me? I just want to get two seconds alone where I can think a coherent thought without someone interrupting me with a crisis like “My brother peed in the trash can.”
And bedtime? If it were up to my kids, they would be able to stay up all hours of the night. They would not need sleep at all. They would walk around trying to remember where they last put down the baby, whining about how untidy the house is and how they’re too exhausted to do anything about it.
Oh, wait. That’s me.
I’m sure their dreams will become more refined over the years. Maybe they’ll even get to hang right up there with Martin Luther King Jr., inspiring people to dream for themselves and make change and dare to love. Or maybe I’m just kidding myself and the only thing they’ll ever want is the newest model Apple product.
So much for dreams.
by Rachel Toalson | General Blog
Every year Husband and I sit down to make some goals for the New Year. And, of course, this year was no different, although six boys make it a little hard to have any stretch of uninterrupted time to write out goals and make them look remotely pretty. So if these don’t make a lick of sense, I’m sorry. We’re drowning here, and my life preserver has a hole in it.
1. Stop having homicidal thoughts toward my children.
I’m kidding. Or am I? No, really I am. I don’t ever have homicidal thoughts toward my children. Actually, if I’m being candidly honest, the thoughts that tend to come sometimes are, “I wonder if I could give these two away to that one family member and then just keep the rest.” And the “these two” part changes every day, because the easy ones change every day, too. That’s a lie. “These two” are almost always the twins in the terrible 3s. They’re the most consistent team in my house. But in the new year, I would like to make it my goal to not let any of those I’d-like-to-give-you-away thoughts come. This is a tall order, but the twins will turn 4, and I’ve heard 4 is a turning-around point for kids like them. At least that’s what I hold tight to when another twin catastrophe comes swinging in.
2. Make one meal where no one says, “I don’t like that” before they even taste it.
Maddening. Here I’ve slaved over a damn stove all afternoon, and I put that yummy chicken soup with the ingredients I threw together, because someone ate all the carrots and someone spilled the oregano and someone else was snacking on the chicken while I wasn’t looking, and, also, I’m not the best at planning meals, but still, it took an hour to cook, and before they even taste it, someone says, “Aw, I hate that.” Yeah, well, I hate you right now, too. I’m kidding. Or am I?
3. Never watch another episode of the following shows: Pokemon, Octonauts, SpongeBob SquarePants, (fill in your own blank).
I’ll say what we’re all thinking: Kids’ shows are the worst shows ever. Not only do they have theme songs that will get caught in our brains for a thousand years, but they usually feature a whole slew of children’s voices. I don’t know about you, but I have enough children’s voices in my house trying to get my attention. I don’t need another little-kid voice trying to explain what a vampire squid is, because I’ve got plenty little-kid voices pontificating about how they didn’t have milk today and so I have to get them some right this very minute and make it a double portion and informing me that their poop was green today and sharing everything they learned when playing Plants vs. Zombies for their 10 minutes of technology time. I feel like murdering my TV, that’s what I feel like. We don’t watch a whole lot of TV, but when we do, my God. I would like those characters to disappear forever.
(Kids shows that are an exception in my book: Fresh Beat Band and Yo Gabba Gabba. If anyone knows how to stream those shows, spill all your secrets. We don’t have cable, so I don’t get to watch my favorite kid shows anymore. I’m dying to know what’s happening with Marina and Shout.)
4. Make our home a Kidz Bop-free zone.
Oh, come on. You know what I’m talking about. That perfectly fine Taylor Swift song that’s sung by a little girl in a particularly nasally way, and instead of the lyrics, “Got a long list of ex-lovers, they’ll tell you I’m insane” the words are changed to something kid-friendly like “Got a list of old friends, they’ll tell you I’m to blame,” and even though it’s almost a little bit clever the way they changed it like that, there is something maddeningly annoying about a kid putting the song on repeat, and now all you hear is “Got a list of old friends, they’ll tell you I’m to blame” when the song plays forty million times on the radio (two months ago, at least). I almost bought my kid a Kidz Bop CD for Christmas, because they really do love them and have been checking them out from the library for months, but then I remembered the songs and the kids’ voices and how they can drive me up one wall and right back down the other.
Nope.
5. Put the kids to bed once and have them stay there.
I know, I know. They should be staying in their beds every night. They should stay put, because I’m the parent. I’m probably not putting my foot down quite forcefully enough. Well, I’ll tell you what. I’ll trade you for a day, let you take care of six boys for twenty-six whole hours and we’ll see if you feel like putting them back to bed three million times at the end of your day. Husband and I are done by the time bedtime rolls around. We’ve gotten really good at pretending not to hear footsteps and laughter and knocking. We lock the little ones in their room, where they can’t get out and terrorize the house or, worse, DIE (they ate a whole tube of toothpaste at 3 a.m. one morning while the rest of the house was sleeping. Husband happened to hear a thump and went to investigate. Twins and a squeezed-empty tube of peppermint delight, also smeared all around their mouths. The clues were hard to ignore.) And then we ignore the rest.
6. Put items in the recycling basket and not have them come climbing back out when the 9-year-old is on trash duty.
My 9-year-old is an environmentalist, and he likes to save things and re-imagine what in the world they could be used for. This is a great thing, except I’m not so keen on climbing into bed with a mascara container he thinks I could reuse if I “just think hard enough.”
7. Stop expecting my children to remember our nightly routine—even though it’s been done every night of their lives.
There are routines we have set firmly in place in our house. Some of them we’ve been doing for as long as the oldest has been alive—nine years. One would think this would be more than enough time to establish that as an every-single-day routine. And yet our kids act like it’s a surprise every night when story time rolls around and it’s time for them to sit quietly in their spots (they thought it was jump-on-the-couch-naked time, but that’s doesn’t even have a time slot on our schedule.). They act surprised that it’s time for lights out when 8:20 rolls around and they have no more time to silently read or write in their journals. They act surprised that they have to take a bath and brush their teeth and put on pajamas because we’re parents who care about good hygiene (mostly).
So, rather than expecting them to remember that this is a routine and we’ve done it every single night, I’m just going to start expecting that they will put up a fight and be pleasantly surprised when they don’t. Optimism and all that.
8. Leave the house once and not have to search for shoes or cups or jackets or kids.
It never fails. Every time we try to leave the house, someone is missing shoes. Or a jacket they remember hanging on their hook when they took it off (yeah, right) is not there. Or someone needs drink real quick. Or someone went missing. Our kids make us late more times than they make us on time, and in the new year, I would just like to leave once without searching for something important, just to prove we can.
9. Take the argument time from two hours to one.
We have one of those strong-willed kids (actually we have a few of them, but two are too young to be skilled at it, thank God). He also happens to be a sticky-brained child, which is, as you might imagine, quite an easy combination to parent. He doesn’t fight about everything, mind you. But he fights about at least one thing every day. He’s become quite skilled at picking his battles. The things that are really important to him—say, building with LEGOs when it’s not time to build with LEGOs because it’s time for him to get in the bath—he will push and push and push until we’re too tired even to breathe anymore. It doesn’t matter how many times you’ve told him that “the answer is no,” he will fight. I would like to lessen the amount of time we spend arguing every day. (It’s not really two hours right now. I’m kidding. Or am I?)
10. Go a whole week without hearing a blood-curdling scream.
I live with a pack of boys. Screaming is what they do, mostly because they prefer to live dangerously. They’ll jump from the tree house to the trampoline and scream when their leg gets caught wrong beneath them. They’ll try to jump from the trampoline to the rock-climbing wall on their play scape and scream when they bonk their head. They’ll slide down the stairs head-first at the same time and scream when somebody got going a little too fast and kicked him in the nose as if kicking a brother in the head would stop his trajectory down. All that to say, I’m not really sure how realistic this goal is, but I’d really like to try.
As you can see, I have big plans for 2016 in my parenting life. It’s a good thing these goals depend on really fickle, unreliable little humans, because otherwise, they’d be way too easy. Goals are supposed to challenge us, right?
Well, challenge accepted.
by Rachel Toalson | General Blog
“The hardest part of being a Mother is when they become adults and cut your heart to pieces.”
“Wait until they’re teenagers. Then you’ll have something to complain about.”
“Oh, please. Mothering isn’t hard until they get to the teens.”
-I Have it Worst
Dear I Have it Worst: I know I’m not a parent of a young adult yet. I know I don’t have to figure out hormones and girlfriends and how to handle broken curfews. I know my little people are way easier to control than the big people they will one day be. But have you ever tried to wrestle a plunger that just went swimming in poo from four 3-year-old hands, and as soon as you finally peel those 20 fingers from the stick and turn around to put the (still-dripping) plunger somewhere they can’t reach it, one of those four hands dips into the brown water to finish the job it wanted to do in the first place? Have you ever tried to stop an 8-year-old from digging out the old pacifiers from the trash can because he thinks they can be recycled into something new? Have you ever tried to convince a 5-year-old that horizontal stripes don’t really match vertical stripes?
I know, I know. The answer is probably “I’ve done things much harder than that.” I’m just trying to get you to practice this little amazing communication secret called “empathy,” which means “to remember how it felt when your 3-year-old drew all over his brand new organic cotton sheets with a permanent marker you didn’t know he had and you wanted to murder him.” I bet you thought it was dang hard, too.
(This isn’t a competition. Stop making it one.)
“A mother simply propagates a virus upon the earth. They all need to be destroyed.”
—Violently Yours
Dear Violently Yours: Let’s just use a little logic here. “A mother simply propagates a virus.” For anything to propagate a virus upon the earth, that means it must have been a virus, too. I’ve been called a lot of things, but this one is new. A virus? That sounds intriguing. Like a mum flu or a mothebola virus. I sure wish that’s what I were, because there are a lot of women in my life who would really like to have a baby. If I could infect them, you bet I would.
I know you meant your comment to be something far worse but I feel like I have to thank you for the compliment. I’ll remind you that a virus is so small it can only be seen with a microscope. Now. I’ve had six kids, including twins. There is no part of my body small enough to only be detected by a microscope. Maybe my brain. I can’t seem to remember anything anymore. So I appreciate the vote of confidence in my ability to shrink back to regular (or nearly nonexistent) size after six children, but I assure you, we’re not anywhere close.
Try again.
“I’ve met some really shitty mothers.”
-What’s Your Point
Dear What’s Your Point: Welp, I’m not one of them. I actually rock at being a mother. The only thing I have in common with your comment is what I do most mornings at about 9 a.m., give or take a few.
“Sounds like whining to me and she has a husband to boot. I am a single mom and I don’t feel this way. Thank God. There are some days when I want my son to leave me alone for 5 min but it’s not hard. Suck it up butter cup!”
“SHUT THE HELL UP! You are a mother now grow up. She seems like a spoiled little brat who wants her single life with kids back again. Can’t go back so look forward and be positive!”
-Parenting is Super Easy
Dear Parenting is Super Easy: I like this world you live in. How did you get there? May I please come, too? Because I live in a world where parenting is stinking hard, and it’s not because I’m not a good mom or because I never should have had kids or because I want my single life back. It’s just that I now live in a world where one of my kids will bust into my room in the middle of the night to tell me he feels like he needs to puke two seconds before he actually does, all over my comfy comforter that requires a bath in the tub and a stint out on the back porch to get clean. Now I have six boys who like to climb the walls like Spider-Man and put gigantic spitballs on the ceiling and leave LEGOs all over the floor so the baby is constantly in danger of choking on one of them. That doesn’t mean I’d trade my life today for my no-kids one. IT JUST MEANS THAT IT’S HARD. It just means it’s not perfect. It just means there are days I feel like tapping out, for just a second or a minute or a whole afternoon.
Scratch that. I’m totally lying. The real reason it feels hard is because all I really want to do is lie on the couch and read the latest George R.R. Martin novel and sip on a little red wine so it dulls my senses and I don’t have to hear the kids losing their minds about wanting dinner and why don’t they ever have food and who’s going to pour them milk. Why do kids have to be so dang hard?
“Are they all yours? My God.”
-Tactless
Dear Tactless: What’s a number you’d be comfortable with? One? Two? Maybe three? Well, then, that’s how many are mine. The rest are strays who just thought we looked like better parents than the ones they had. And hey. What’s a few more when you already have three?
What? They all look like me? Huh. That’s weird. I guess I get around.
“You have enough for a basketball team. With a sub!”
-Sports Analogies Are the Best
Dear Sports Analogies Are the Best: You smart thing. How did you guess? That’s exactly what we were trying to do. We got married and, 18 months later, looked at each other and said, “WE SHOULD START A TOALSON BASKETBALL TEAM, because that would be really cool!” And now here we are. It’s a really good thing we went for that sub, because a few of them can’t dribble a ball without breaking their nose. I think we probably need a couple more, just to be safe.
“Are you done yet?”
-Just Call Me Nosy
Dear Just Call Me Nosy: Nope. We’re not done until we beat the Duggars and get our own television show. Because that’s the whole point of having babies, isn’t it? Breaking the record for how many babies a body can produce in 25 years and snagging your own sitcom? I still have 10 or 15 good years of childbearing left, and you better believe we are going to use them.
“You were trying for a girl, weren’t you.”
-Big Mouth
Dear Big Mouth: No. I’ve wanted six boys since I was a little girl, and that’s exactly what happened. Lucky me.
Also, what’s wrong with boys? What’s wrong with wanting more boys?
“Stop using your choice to have six kids as an excuse to do nothing else.”
-Supermom
Dear Supermom: Gosh, I admire you. I’m sure you have a perfectly manicured yard and your homemade bread never caves in the middle and all your kids’ shoes match and are on the right feet every morning. And your kids probably never turn in a school paper late. And you never yell when the 3-year-old sneaks out of bed and hoards all the toothbrushes in the blue cup for God knows what reason, even though he’s been told and told and told not to wander and especially not to hoard toothbrushes because you’re tired of buying toothbrushes. And you throw the most spectacular birthday parties on the block. I wish I could be you. I really do.
But, alas, the only thing I do all day is lie on the couch and watch my hoodlums tear up my house around me so I have a reason to blame them for everything. I can’t clean house, because I have six kids. I can’t cook dinner, because I have six kids. I’ve been wearing the same workout pants for four days, because I have six kids.
The gulf between you and me is light years apart, so I give. You keep being your awesome super mom self, and I’ll keep being my despicable lazy mom self.
Thanks for commenting! If you have any personal issue with any of my answers, please email idontcare@babymakingfactory.com. And I’m sure I’ll see you around again soon!
by Rachel Toalson | General Blog
The other day I was trying to put my 3-year-old in the car, and we were in a hurry, because I wanted to get to the grocery store and back before it was time for their lunch, since you definitely DO NOT want to be caught out in public when two headstrong 3-year-olds and a 9-month-old decide they’re hungry and you’re not feeding them fast enough, because, look, we’re surrounded by food and all you have to do is BUY SOMETHING FOR THEM.
That’s a fight I didn’t want to have today. So I was doing my best to buckle the 3-year-old quickly and make sure the chest piece was positioned in the exact place it should be, because I’m all about safety, while he was more concerned with waving a book he’d found in my face.
“Look, Mama,” he kept saying over and over and over again. Wave, wave, wave.
“I’m trying to buckle you,” I said.
“But look what I found,” he said, still waving it in my face. I took the book and threw it down on the floor of the van.
“Stop putting the book in my face,” I said. “I don’t like it when you shove things in my face.”
He ignored me, of course, because he’s a 3-year-old and that’s what 3-year-olds do, and he replaced a book with his finger, which I know I just saw up his nose. It took a few impressive Matrix moves that I’m still feeling today to get out of that sticky spot, and then he was buckled and we were on our merry way, my annoyance dissipating with every mile we logged, replaced by anxiety and dread, because who in their right mind takes two 3-year-olds and a 9-month-old to a grocery store? I was totally setting myself up for failure, and I knew it.
But I distracted myself by thinking about how kids probably don’t even understand the whole concept of “I don’t like having things shoved in my face,” because they don’t realize they’re shoving a book in a face. They’re just trying to get our attention. It’s how they communicate.
I know, because I watched them after we got home from the store. The two 3-year-olds were talking to each other, and one would hold a train right up into the face of the other one and say, “I want this one. Do you want this one?” Twin 1 was trying to pick a fight, but Twin 2 wasn’t taking the bait, mostly because he couldn’t see the train that was right up in his face. It was too close. So he just ignored it and said, “No,” and went right on playing.
There are so many things that kids don’t understand. Take, for instance, the “please don’t put your stinky feet on me.”
First of all, kids don’t even know what stinky smells like. They sort of know stinky when it comes to things like farts and sweaty armpits and food they don’t like, but when it comes to anything connected to their body, stinky is not a word in their vocabulary. They will come in from playing outside in the middle of a Texas summer and smell like a whole pasture full of cows and dung and the dog that was dispatched to round up all the strays who need milking, even though we don’t live anywhere near cows. They will fight to the death about taking a bath, no matter how many times we tell them that the smell they keep looking around trying to find is actually them.
Every night at dinner, the 9-year-old, without even thinking, will put his stinky feet that have been trapped inside his tennis shoes all day, on my legs. All over them, actually. He moves them up and down and side to side, because he has trouble sitting still after all that overstimulation at school. I can practically see the fumes swirling up from his black socks with the neon green toes, and those fumes get to be rubbed all over my legs. Just what I wanted.
He does it because he’s not thinking and because he loves me, but THIS IS NOT LOVE. Trust me. It’s dinnertime, and all I can smell is Fritos mixed with pinto beans and really aged cheese, even though what we’re having is salmon with salad.
Kids also don’t understand things like “Please give me some personal space,” because what is personal space to kids? They will touch me and prod me and lean into me and not think twice about it. They will stand so close to me I’ll trip over them on my way to get some requested milk. They will fall all over each other and think it’s hilarious instead of annoying. They will cling to my legs on the walk to school, and then, when they’ve disappeared from my view because there’s a baby strapped to my frontside, they will stop, and my Matrix move skills will be tested once more as I try to stop myself from falling, and I’ll be sore for another month.
“I would like to go to bed” is probably the most misunderstood phrase in our house. To our kids, this means, “I would like you to come into our room a thousand times seeking extra hugs and kisses and to especially tell us in no less than 1,000 words what you did on the playground today.” Just when we’re falling into dreamland and it’s looking like the most beautiful place we’ve ever seen, someone will knock on our door with something important to tell us, like how he thinks that tomorrow is crazy sock day and he doesn’t have any crazy socks, so can he borrow some, and it will take us five more hours to get back to sleep. “I would like to go to bed” is also code for “You can totally get out of your bed and take all the books down from the library shelves,” if you’re asking our 3-year-old twins, which is why we use a locking doorknob installed backwards on their room and lock them in it at night, because 3-year-olds roaming the house at night is scarier than that freaky doll Chucky coming for a visit with his eyes that never blink.
“Chew with your mouth closed” looks like a 3-year-old trying to figure out how in the world you’re supposed to chew food when you close your mouth, looking confusedly at all his brothers who have mastered the talent and then, after rolling the food around his mouth with his tongue, opting to swallow it whole so he chokes on a stump of unchewed broccoli. “You’re not hungry; you’re just bored,” gets me tagged as the “worst mother ever.” And “That’s not in our budget right now” results in a boy fetching my wallet, pulling out a credit card and saying, “Then use this,” reminding me that I need to teach him about responsible use of credit cards, because society’s claws are thick.
So maybe things get a little lost in translation, but the truth is I’m kind of glad. Because it’s those times I feel really annoyed that a kid is waving something in my face and I’ve already asked him to stop once that I remember how these are all places where I get to consider things from their point of view and I get to remember what it was like to be a kid and I get to take a deep, long breath and hope I’m breathing in patience and not more boiling annoyance. And then I get to be a good mother who teaches and directs and walks them toward a deeper understanding of what it means to be human.
But, seriously, if you don’t get your stinky feet off me…
