by Rachel Toalson | General Blog
You know that scene in Cinderella where she’s in the kitchen trying to get things ready for the day, and on the wall there’s this collection of bells ringing incessantly, signaling that people who are depending on her (mostly because they’re lazy) need things? Every morning, my kitchen fills with its own chorus of little bells, too, except those bells are walking around in the form of two 3-year-olds, a 5-year-old, a 6-year-old and an 8-year-old, and I can’t just simply leave the room to get away from their clanging, because they have legs and will follow me to the edge of the world without asking any questions about where I’m going.
“Mama!” the 5-year-old will say in the whiniest voice I’ve ever heard (and that’s saying a lot. I’ve really cleaned up my act.). “I can’t find my shoes.”
He’s not even out of bed yet, so I’m pretty sure he hasn’t even attempted “looking,” which I put in quotations because “looking” for a 5-year-old consists of sometimes seeing what’s right in front of his face, sometimes not. He just tripped over one of those missing shoes, and he still hasn’t found them.
His bell is followed up closely by one of the twins saying, “Mama, my brudder beat me down the stairs.” If only I could turn back time.
Followed, almost in the same breath, by his twin brother saying, “Mama, I firsty. I need milk, Mama. Mama, I need milk. I firsty, Mama” without even the slightest pause so that I can let him know that his milk is already on the table if he would just “look.”
“Where’s my blue folder?” the 8-year-old will say, even though I’m not the one in charge of his blue folder and there’s a designated place for it and I can see it sticking out from that designated place right his very minute.
“Oh! I forgot (fill in the blank),” the 6-year-old says on a regular basis. Usually that fill-in-the-blank looks something like forgetting that he’s VIP student this week and he needs to bring a poster with pictures of himself and his family on it so that all the other students will know who he is and what he wants to be when he grows up. Or forgetting that he’s supposed to have his book club book finished today, and he still has 75 pages to read. Or forgetting that there was a birthday party he was invited to this weekend, and he didn’t get to go, and how can we possibly keep track of all this? (To be fair, some of this isn’t even his fault, it’s our fault for failing at school. I haven’t signed a folder in weeks, and it’s only November.)
Get me a drink, I hungry, I can’t find my shoes, where’s my library book, please hold me just because, help me, carry me, push in my chair, where’s my folder, sign my papers, I’m cold, I’m hot, I’m hungry, I need my vitamins, bring me my blanket, where’s my backpack, can you turn on the light, I need more toilet paper, I want more, More, MORE.
With all these children and all their constant demands, sometimes I start feeling a little like Cinderella, except I’m a mama. Cinder-Mama. It’s like the fairy tale I always wanted, except it’s not.
Brush my hair, wash me off, wipe my bottom, what’s ten plus ten, I want my color book, the baby’s getting into the crayons, button my pants, tie my shoes, help me up, kiss this hurt, when’s dinner, can we go to the store because I have two dollars to spend, I need a snack, I can’t open the toothpaste, aw, man, it’s the minty toothpaste, I like the strawberry toothpaste, what are you doing? going to the bathroom? You don’t have a penis, where does your peepee come out?
There is something inherent in a mama that hears a need and that wants to meet it, desperately, right this minute. But the thing is, if I try to meet every single need in my house, I will go a little crazy.
Because one minute the 5-year-old will need someone to show him how to tie his shoes, again, and, at the same time, the 6-year-old will want help pouring the milk, because it’s a new gallon and I’m really thankful that he’s asking because the last thing I want is a whole gallon of milk dumped out onto the floor, but there’s no way in the world that I can be in two places at one time, and so one of those needs is going to have to remain unmet until I can manage it.
I tried to be in two places at once one time, and I ended up feeling resentful and angry that they would ask me to do so many things at the same time even though there was only one of me and six of them. So I had to take a step back. I had to breathe. I had to say it was okay that I couldn’t meet every single need the first time they asked. Or even the fifth time they asked. Or ever, sometimes (they did, after all, wish they could have gone to that party they missed. I was Cinder-Mama, not Fairy GodMama). It was good for them to learn how to wait. It was good for them to learn to do things for themselves. It was good for them to realize they were fully capable of doing what I could do.
So they started tying their own shoes, because they figured out they could do hard things. They started pouring their own milk, even if it was a brand new gallon, because they knew they had permission to screw up and spill, as long as they cleaned it up. They started writing their own events on a calendar and waiting to be hugged and kissed and taking responsibility for their own backpacks and shoes and school folders.
They don’t always remember, of course. There are mornings when it still sounds like there are shrieking bells wrapped around my ankles. There are days they forget “mama” is not synonymous with “servant,” but they are learning, day by day by day, that they are fully capable of handling the world on their own.
No more Cinder-Mama. Except for my indescribable beauty, of course.
by Rachel Toalson | General Blog
Husband and my older boys have lately been trying to cram in some viewings of old Star Wars movies before the new one comes out. It’s important, Husband says, to introduce them to Luke and Yoda and Hans and, most of all, The Force.
I see his point. I mean, I remember watching all the Star Wars movies as a kid and enjoying the story, because it’s a good one, and even thinking that maybe, just maybe The Force was real, and I could one day do what Luke Skywalker did, if I could only find a light saber.
It’s just that when he says it’s important to introduce the boys to The Force, I take exception. Because my boys are already well-acquainted with The Force. It’s what they use to
1. Get their clothes in the laundry hamper…or not.
I know, I know. All the times I’ve come across their renegade pieces of clothing, smashed right up against a laundry hamper, it’s just because they’re still not that great at using The Force to get their clothes inside it. They just need a little more practice. That’s all. And when I come across a shirt or some pants or missing underwear on the couch or their bedroom floor or in the bathroom sink, it’s probably because one of their brothers did an arm fart in the middle of their putting-away-my-clothes-by-using-The-Force practice, and that’s why their aim is so far off. Fewer distractions, they need.
2. Put their dirty bowls, silverware and plates in the sink…or not.
It doesn’t matter if they’ve had three times every day for the last eight years to practice this skill, it’s just a really tough one to learn. I can understand that. Some things take time. Lots of time. I realize they really, really, really want to get those bowls and silverware and plates in the sink, but The Force isn’t strong enough to even pick them up off the table. Maybe The Force doesn’t work as well when it comes to wood and food. Force interference, they are.
3. Turn off lights…or not.
I get that this is a tricky thing to do, that flicking a finger from across the room to turn the light off in the last room they left. I’m sure The Force employs some intricately designed movement that requires motor skills my boys don’t have yet, because every time I pass their rooms at any time of the day, the light is blazing and no one’s home. When I point out the left-on light, they act like they forgot, but that’s just a ruse, because boys don’t always like admitting to what they can’t yet do. Better honed motor skills, this requires.
4. Set the table…or not.
I’m sure this goes back to The Force not working when it comes to things like wood and food, or forks and spoons and plates, because every time I ask one of them to set the table so I can finish up dinner, I turn around to put all those pots and pans on the table, and there are no plates and forks and spoons with which to eat, and they’re all in the living room reading or building a block tower or banging out an original melody on the piano, as if they thought this job was already done. Different kind of Force, this entails.
5. Shut the door…or not.
You would think this might be the easiest of them all. Go out the door, pull The Force along with you. Come inside, fling The Force behind you. But I guess I have some young Padawans who haven’t quite made it to Jedi status, because most of time, when they’re coming in or out, they don’t even seem to notice the door standing ajar and all the flies following them in. I wish there were a Force that could beat the flies, because they seem to love our house. So much so that the 6-year-old wrote an essay in school about how if he had a pet, it would be a fly-eating frog, so it could catch all the flies his mom hates. Which is why I really want my kids to master this closing-the-door-using-The-Force, because we don’t need kids’ teachers to know about things like that. More Physical Force, I demand.
6. Wash their bodies…or not.
I really wish I could help them here. If only words could pull enough of The Force with them to lather up the kids in the bath. Because “make sure it’s the first thing you do” is the same thing I say every single night when they get in the bath, and when that timer clangs and I tell them it’s time to get out, their hair isn’t even wet. I know they’re really trying to use The Force in between driving that car up the sides of the bath tub and pretending like they’re swimming in deep water. It’s not an easy thing to tell them it’s just not working, but somebody’s gotta do it. Intensified training, they need.
7. Put away the laundry…or not.
Oh, wait. That’s me. This is the one time The Force actually works for my boys, even if it ends up piling underwear in a closet and shoving hang-up shirts in the pajama drawer and crumpling jeans in the underwear drawer. I don’t even care. At least The Force put it all away. Better than I’m doing, it is.
Well. Now that I’ve written all of that out, I can better understand where my little Padawans are coming from. They just need a more skilled Jedi Master to help them hone their powers and teach them the intricate subtleties of using The Force.
Since it’s clear that The Force doesn’t work for Husband, either, I guess that means I signed up to be their Yoda. To work, I go.
by Rachel Toalson | General Blog
Six boys produce a lot of destruction around my house. Everywhere I look, there are nicks in bookshelves and unintended holes in the walls from errant hands or fingers or just curiosity, and there are cracked toilet lids and pictures frames that have no more glass and shattered lights that took an accidental knocking.
But the destruction, by far, hits toys the hardest. Mostly because toys are made of paper. Or something similar. They’re surely not made of anything durable, like steel. Or iron. Or cement.
I know, I know. If we had toys made of steel or iron or cement, we’d have bigger things to worry about, and besides, boys wouldn’t even be able to lift them, which might be my point.
I have no idea what goes through the minds of toy manufacturers when they’re building these complicated little things intended for boy play. I imagine it’s something like this: “Haha! Finally! Here is something they’ll never be able to destroy.”
The answer is always false.
My boys get pretty wild and rowdy when they’re playing, but, from what I’ve observed, it’s not any more wild and rowdy than their friends, including some girls. Kids play hard. It’s their favorite thing to do, and that means that many times, the toys they choose to play with are on their last life. Or maybe they never really had a life in the first place, because as soon as they came home and saw the boys, they gave up (remember the scene in Toy Story 4 then Woody and Buzz and Jessie watch the kids at daycare play with the old toys and you can just tell they’re terrified to be brought into the room? That’s what I imagine any toys coming into our house feel like, if they had feelings.).
So I’m just putting it out there, toy manufacturers: If you want to test whether or not your product is really durable—and I’m talking nothing-is-going-to-destroy-this durable—send it to my house.
Here are some things we’ve already tried:
1. Anything made of foam.
Once upon a time, my second son got a Thor foam hammer for his birthday. It was the coolest thing, if you talked to him. Two days later, it was about half its original size, with tiny little bite marks all over it, because his little brother thought it looked like a good thing to tear apart with his teeth. BECAUSE THIS IS THE ONLY THING FOAM IS GOOD FOR.
Trust me. We made light sabers out of pool noodles this summer, because we thought our boys would really enjoy some safe sword play, except it’s hard to sword fight when you’re focused on how many bite marks your light saber has. They kept getting me in the face, because I couldn’t stop staring, marveling at how quickly it had happened.
You know those foam protectors they put on the metal bars of trampolines so kids don’t get hurt while they’re jumping? Yeah, my little foamivores got those, too. Maybe they’ll learn their lesson next time a body part connects with a metal pole.
2. Anything made with a thousand pieces that don’t keep their pieces.
This would be things like LEGOs that get opened and dumped out and no one really cares about putting together that awesome Star Wars starship as much as I do. It would be things like puzzles, which are all packaged in a bag kids can’t open and neither can parents—so when it is finally, finally, finally wrestled open, the pieces go flying everywhere, and at least one of them is sure to disappear. Forever.
(I think toy manufacturers do this on purpose. Someone somewhere is laughing every time a parent sweats through trying to open something and a billion pieces fly everywhere. You know who’s not laughing? Me. Thanks for another anxiety attack, toy manufacturers. My kid just tossed a puzzle into my lap and asked me to open it.)
3. Mr. Potato Head’s butt.
This was just lazy designing, in my opinion. I get why it’s there—easy storage of all the pieces that make Mr. Potato Head Mr. Potato Head, but it’s just that Mr. Potato Head, at least in my house, has a very leaky butt, because every other minute my kids are asking me to put Mr. Potato Head’s butt on, except we don’t allow the word “butt” in our house, so it sounds more like, “Can you put Mr. Potato Head’s booty back on,” which is really kind of ridiculous and a little bit cute. I’ll put it back on, and then I’ll watch them fill it up with pieces and close it and then open it again, and, whoops, there went the butt flap again and all the pieces are spilling out and my kid is throwing Mr. Potato Head across the room, because it’s just so frustrating. I get it. It’s frustrating when you have a leaky butt on your hands.
4. Action figures.
These guys. I feel sorry for them. They lose limbs like we lose matching shoes. I’ve found Captain America with only one arm, but “at least he still has his shield,” the boys say. I’ve found Hulk without a head, which would be a very dangerous Hulk, if you ask me. I’ve found Iron Man missing a leg, but “at least he can still fly.”
All I know is I’m hoping they won’t come back to avenge their missing limbs, because I have no idea where they are.
5. Games.
Now, I love playing Apples to Apples and Ticket to Ride and Dominion and even Cards Against Humanity just like any other parent, and even when it comes to kids’ games, I love Battleship and Candy Land and Operation. It’s just that even though these games are super fun and most of my boys are old enough to play them, they come with two thousand tiny pieces. And they’re packaged in boxes.
This alone is a recipe for disaster, but put together, it’s a recipe for we’ll-never-play-this-again. The boys try to cram on the box lid, even though the Battleship board is still halfway open, and the box tears in half, and then the pieces are everywhere, and we have to break out the Duct tape, and even still, pieces go missing. Ever tried to play Operation without the liver and the heart and the funny bone? It’s not as much fun.
6. Anything that’s super cool.
The 8-year-old once got a microscope for his birthday, because he was really into science (and still is), but it lasted all of three days, because he left it out on the table once, and one of his twin brothers decided to see what would happen if he squeezed the tiny little light bulb. Easy enough to fix, except that when he crushed it with his tiny little hands, he also bent a piece that wouldn’t permit any other right bulb to be screwed in.
The 6-year-old once got a really cool bug catcher that broke the first time a fly got caught. (I know. That wasn’t his fault.) Another boy once got a frogosphere where you can raise your own frogs, and we didn’t even try that one, because we’re talking about live animals. After what these boys do to toys? No thanks. You just dodged a bullet, baby frogs.
7. Scooters.
It’s amazing how difficult it is to align the handlebars with the wheels on a scooter and how amazingly easy it is to mangle this contraption beneath the tires of a minivan when boys forget to put it back on the porch.
8. Stuffies.
If the 3-year-olds are left alone with a stuffed animal for any amount of time, they will defluff it, which is about as terrible as it sounds. Every now and then they sneak a little stuffy past my eyes and hide it under their pillow until I take a bathroom break from my post right outside their room, which is where I have to stay if there’s any chance that they will take a nap, and when I come back, I find a miniature throw carpets that have dog heads and lion heads and pink elephant heads with sparkly purple eyes.
In fact, this has happened so often recently I’m considering starting a business selling slippers made from old, defluffed stuffed animals. Because those little throw rugs look suspiciously like the material used for kids slippers. Might as well make a profit off my boys’ destruction.
All I’m really trying to say, toy manufacturers, is that you’re going to have to do better than this. Let’s see you make something cool that will not be taken apart in ten seconds and put back together all wrong, or maybe, worse, better than before. Let’s see you make something that can withstand cross-purpose playing (like puppet sticks that are actually durable enough to be used as swords—which will happen). Let’s see you make something kids can’t destroy.
I know it’s a daunting task, but judging by the price of that action hero castle they got for Christmas last year that was destroyed two hours later, I’m paying you about $25 an hour. You can do this. I know you can.
Plus, my boy just put a cool Star Wars light saber on his birthday wish list, and I still remember what happened to the last one. No one wants to see an 8-year-old on a war path to figure out who broke his favorite toy. Trust me.
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.
