by Rachel Toalson | Messy Mondays
This is a lesson in the subtle practice of subtlety. Or perhaps how to be nonchalant. Or perhaps how not to get in trouble when you paint the mirror with toothpaste.
My boys are really, really bad at squeezing out toothpaste onto their toothbrushes. What inevitably happens when we remind them to brush their teeth every night (because they somehow forget it has to happen every night) is that they will either squeeze too much and eat the excess (which is why we no longer buy strawberry toothpaste. Eating toothpaste just isn’t the same when your mouth is burning minty fresh.) or they’ll squeeze too much and use the rest for mirror art.
See Exhibit A above.
For a while I solved this problem by squeezing out toothpaste on five toothbrushes myself and letting them know their toothbrushes were ready for toothbrushing. At least until the second day when I tripped over the stool someone had put right up next to the door and I caught myself on the counter and I couldn’t pull my hands back off. Someone had painted the counter with toothpaste, and it had turned to glue. There were two flies caught and held in it.
Toothpaste-smeared mirrors are better than toothpaste-sticky counters, so I let them have at it.
There aren’t many kinds of art I dislike, but toothpaste art is one of them. Probably the only one, come to think of it. Mostly because it’s virtually impossible to get toothpaste off the mirror in one good swipe. I don’t have a whole lot of time to clean my house, so one good swipe is usually all I have. But toothpaste is like, come on, guys, let’s give her a hard time and have a little fun at the same time by exploring ALL THE INCHES OF THIS MIRROR. And then on swipe two it hides in the mirror’s corners like minty webs waiting to catch the gnats hanging out by the toilet for some reason, probably because this is a boy’s bathroom, and then on the third swipe it finally realizes it’s beaten and I’m not giving up.
Usually, when this type of art shows up on the mirrors, the artist doesn’t have the foresight to sign his name, but this time someone was really proud of what he’d done. This art was proudly drawn by the son we call Asa.
Now he is cleaning the mirror until it shines, which is much better than it looked before, so I guess I should thank him for breaking the rules and using toothpaste to practice his letters.
This is how we teach lessons in our house.
And I’m sure next time he thinks about painting his artful flourishes across a mirror with toothpaste he’ll think twice and remember how long it took him to clean off this artwork and how his friends were knocking on the door and he couldn’t go outside with them until the mirror passed Daddy’s inspection.
Or maybe he’ll just leave off his name. Which, in all honesty, is what I would do.
by Rachel Toalson | Messy Mondays
Yes. You’re right. It goes so fast. Just yesterday I had a kid and today he’s almost 9. How did that happen? How did he suddenly get those knobby-kneed legs and a smart(er) mouth and a running speed that makes me work as hard as I can to not completely embarrass myself when we’re racing up the street because he’s really good at the flight response when anything doesn’t go his way. (He doesn’t know we’re racing, but we totally are. Also, he’s not really running away, for those who are concerned. He just needs a little run sometimes, to get some steam off. He knows where he’s loved most, and he’ll always come back. I just like to get a little exercise and make sure he doesn’t get run over by the neighborhood kids coming home from school and trying to drive by iPhone).
I’m familiar with the whole time-flying thing.
It’s just that this weekend Husband and I get to have a kid-less weekend. It’s the first time in 2015 that we’ve had the opportunity to spend three consecutive days without all the kids (thanks, Mom! I’m sure we’ll have to detox, but those three days are worth it every time!), and I am counting down the days.
Which means the days are crawling.
I’ve lived enough hours for it to be Friday already. Except it’s not. It’s still Monday afternoon.
See, this morning we woke up at 3 because a seal was in our house. It wasn’t really a seal, but we didn’t know it then. Husband got out of bed before I could tell him to be careful with that burglar who brought a seal with him, which sounds odd now that I’m fully awake and not in a dream reverie, but made total sense at 3 a.m. Husband came back to say it was one of the 3-year-olds, courting a croupy cough. So we got to have a little 3 a.m. escapade and give the boy some breathing treatments to loosen all those allergens, and then we got to try to go back to sleep knowing our alarm was going to go off in an hour and a half.
I don’t remember what happened after that, because the next thing I know the alarm was clanging and the house was quiet and I wanted to sit and enjoy it for as long as I possibly could before the morning rush started.
And then the morning rush started, and the 8-year-old couldn’t find his shoes, so we walked to school without him, and the croupy 3-year-old kept barking all the way so other parents would turn to look, and I was like, “What, it’s a free country? I can be outside with my sick kid if I want to,” but maybe they just thought it was a seal chasing them and I was misinterpreting all those glares. Then we got back to the house and it turns out the schoolboys had left out a million and a half things so every other second I had to say, “Nope. Don’t touch that. It’s your brother’s,” while I followed along behind, trying to minimize the damage two very persistent 3-year-olds can do while the baby bounced happily in his little bouncer seat that was, unbeknownst to me, rocketing his poop all the way up his back. He was happy. That’s all I knew. And since it takes four people to take care of the twins, I was doing pretty good just being one.
Nap time lasted fifteen minutes, two toilets nearly overflowed, Lightning McQueen caused a fist-fight, the plunger saw some unsupervised action, and I kept thinking surely it was already Friday. Surely.
And now here I am, Monday afternoon, with four more days between me and the day I can wake up without those delightful little footsteps already pattering down the hall, ready to pound on my door and scare me from sleep.
So, yeah. I know time flies. Most days I don’t want it to. This day (and the next four) I do. So go on, time. Fly.
by Rachel Toalson | Messy Mondays
You see this kid’s face? You should see the wall.
There’s not a mark on it.
We were happily bathing the younger boys, trying to keep the 15 gallons of water inside the tub for once, when our 8-year-old came howling into the house. Now, this isn’t all that unusual. This boy has a penchant for being…dramatic. For example, one day we were at a local museum, which has a kids’ area with kid-sized workout equipment, and he was adjusting the seat on a stationary bike and accidentally scratched his leg on a pedal. He fell on the floor like he was dying, moaning so that a museum worker came over to us and asked if maybe he needed some ice or a first-aid kit or maybe an ambulance. There was hardly a scratch on him. I thanked her for her concern and told her he’d be just fine, and, sure enough, thirty seconds later, he was chasing after one of his brothers who had accidentally picked up the book the 8-year-old had brought with him, because he brings books everywhere, in case there’s a second or two between exhibits when he’ll get a chance to bury himself in a word or two.
He comes howling into the house when he’s tried “skating” with two scooters and runs into the van. He comes howling into the house when his brother mis-aimed a ball and hit him on the foot. He comes howling into the house when he jumps off the trampoline the wrong way (and yet still does it).
So, of course, we didn’t think much of this little display.
Our boy limped up the stairs and into the bathroom, and this time we knew it was for real. His chin was bleeding, his upper lip was bleeding, and his knee was smeared with red.
“What in the world happened?” I said, freaking out a little, but trying hard not to show it.
“I ran into a wall,” he said.
“How did you run into a wall?” Husband said.
“I was riding my scooter too fast and couldn’t stop when I came around the corner of the house,” our son said.
Husband and I looked at each other and tried not to laugh. Because even though we could visualize it almost perfectly—the way he would be cruising down the cul-de-sac, how cocky he gets about his “skillz,” how his face might have looked when he saw he’d misjudged and the wall was coming at him instead of moving away—it really wasn’t funny. It wasn’t. Stop laughing.
We checked him over for broken bones and then cleaned up his scrapes, listening to him talk about how he wouldn’t be able to walk to school the next day and probably couldn’t even go at all because he was so beat up. And you know? I almost felt sorry enough for him to let him stay home (because he’s pretty good at generating a yes). Except that he’s 8. If I’d done what he did, I would be laid up for a week. But he’s 8. His body’s much more capable of bouncing back.
So I smiled at him and said, “I hope you’ve learned your lesson, sweet boy.”
What lesson would that be? Well, apparently he didn’t know, either. Three minutes later, he was back out on the scooter, trying to race his brothers down the hill, navigating between the van’s front bumper and the wall that had beat him up, just so he could be the first one inside and win the prize of…nothing.
I have a sneaking suspicion that this is just my life as a mom of boys. God help me.
by Rachel Toalson | Messy Mondays
Who invented these things? Who could have possibly thought it would be a good idea to market “foam bullets that don’t hurt when you’re hit” to boys of all ages, even when they have a whole head of gray hair or no hair at all? Who made those first sketches for this amazing invention of “won’t-hurt-them” guns and assured their marketing department that they were safe for the wild at heart who have always, deep down, wanted to engage in battle without anyone getting hurt.
Bull. These things DO hurt.
I know, because every time my boys find one of the guns hidden away in our garage and succeed in scaling a refrigerator or antique cabinet (impressively) to get it down, and, somehow, find all the bullets we’ve thrown away and the trash man has already picked up (I think they multiply in the dark of the garage), the first thing they do is point it at me. After which time they’ll then point it at each other. There is always someone crying in my house because of these things. Usually me.
There was a Christmas when someone thought it would be a good idea to buy my boys Nerf guns. A whole house of boys warrants this kind of thing, after all. And at first we were, like, Oh, yeah, cool, they can have battles in the backyard and no one gets hurt, because the bullets are soft and they won’t aim at each other’s heads or use the guns as swords instead. Except they don’t want to have battles in the backyard, and the bullets aren’t soft, and when they run out of bullets, they sword fight with hard plastic instead. The only time it’s even fun to play with these things is when I can wrestle a gun away from one of the boys and turn it on them (“YOU SEE? YOU SEE HOW IT FEELS? QUIT SHOOTING MY BUTT!”).
Here’s all I know. Most of the time, I’m minding my own business, trying to get dinner started or something responsible like that, and a boy creeps up behind me, and the only warning I have is the “whoosh” of the bullet coming. I don’t even have time to get out of the way before my left flank goes completely numb.
So I’m just here to tell you that these Nerf guns? Save your sanity and your money. If I had to slap a warning label on one of these things, this is what it would say:
“Don’t even think about it. Believe me, you do NOT want one of these things even close to your house. Your children will use it to attack you and terrorize their brothers and make little circle rings on every glass surface, and God knows you already have enough of all that without these yellow plastic torture devices waving in your kids’ can’t-really-aim hands. You will regret it every single hour of every single day. Check out those foam swords on aisle 25 instead.
“On second thought, just go straight to the wine aisle and don’t forget some chocolate, because you deserve it!”
Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
by Rachel Toalson | Messy Mondays
I run a monthly book club, because I like to read and I love getting together with a small group of women to chat about our husbands books. We meet once a month, stuffing our faces with chocolate (because it’s the only time we get to eat it without kids or husbands around) and pouring each other wine until way past our bedtimes.
Husband and the boys know when it’s time for my book club meeting, because I’m typically in the kitchen trying to finish icing those dark chocolate brownies with the dark chocolate buttercream icing I just whipped up in a bowl (because I’m also OCD about the food we eat). (Also, just a note for all you foodies: Don’t ever ask me for recipes, unless you want to get angry enough to karate chop my face. I’m terrible at recipes. I know how I make things, and I’m not sharing. Mostly because I don’t even know how it happens. I just pour and mix and get lucky. My mom called me the other day asking how I make my delicious icing. “Um…butter, vanilla extract and powdered sugar,” I said lamely. Just look it up, guys. We live in a Pinterest world, after all.)
My book club ladies and I meet late enough in the evening where I can help with after-dinner chores and bathing the boys and even beginning their evening story time so Husband isn’t completely overwhelmed with putting six boys to bed (It takes 16 people to do a good job. Since it’s just the two of us most of the time, that means we’re doing a…perfect job, of course.).
But sometimes my pumpkin sugar cookie experiment doesn’t quite (shockingly!) turn out the way I really wanted it to, and I have to take a quick trip to the store for some Unreal chocolate candy. In which case, I usually leave right after dinner and so Husband has to execute the after-dinner chores six-on-one. He says he’ll be just fine. I think it probably won’t happen. He says of course they’ll do their chores. I think yeah right. I don’t say what I’m thinking, of course. I wouldn’t want to defeat the man before I’m even out the door. I’ll let him try.
You can see from the picture that after-dinner chores obviously didn’t happen. Why are yesterday’s onions still sitting in that bowl, on top of the cutting board you cut them on like they didn’t even move? Answer: Because only a crazy person would touch after-dinner chores with six boys and only one parent home to referee. I totally understand. I don’t like it, but what am I going to do? Certainly not stay home.
I’ve been running this book club for more than a year now. I have returned home at 11 p.m. to Husband playing some songs to friends on periscope and an 8-year-old still reading upstairs in the library because someone forgot to tell him it was time for lights out. I have returned to 3-year-old twins dressed in their seven-month-old brother’s pajamas (It’s not even spandex. It’s a second skin with dinosaurs on it.) because someone didn’t check to make sure they weren’t tearing their room apart with already-folded clothes. I have returned to a 5-year-old curled up on the floor outside our bedroom and Husband in the bedroom with headphones on watching a movie.
It’s not that Husband can’t handle six boys. I mean, he was a boy himself once. He’s told me horror stories about the things that he and his brother used to do (We have so much coming). We just do things differently, that’s all.
Yeah. We just do things differently.
So, when I’m done shaking my head about how that rock-hard piece of bread possibly made it past the eyes of the parent on duty who wasn’t me and into the top bunk of a 3-year-old, where it was smashed all underneath his thrashing body during the night (because that’s how 3-year-olds sleep), I usually just thank Husband for trying again.
Cleaning up a toilet papered bathroom is totally worth taking a mom’s night out. Every single time.
by Rachel Toalson | Messy Mondays
Dear Mr. President,
I totally get it. I know that full-time workers deserve a break. We work really hard, week after week, month after month, year after year, helping our great country stand tall with the other countries of the world. It’s really nice to have Labor Day to remind us that we’re appreciated and honored. I love getting a day off just as much as the next person.
The problem is that Labor Day isn’t also Parent Labor Day.
We just started the school year, and I just packed these boys off to school, and now you’re sending them back home to me on my holiday? That’s not a holiday. Can I please go to work instead?
I miss my kids when they’re in school. I really do. But not enough to spend a holiday with them just eight days after school started in the first place. Not enough to deal with the mess they can make in 30 seconds of being awake. (See Exhibit A, below.)
This is my dining room table. We don’t eat here, because kids and hands don’t mix with a glass-top table (I know. We bought it before we had kids.). But still. This is the first thing you see when you walk through the doors of our home. This happened because my school boys get Labor Day as a holiday, too.
Does this look like a good Labor Day holiday? Maybe for them. Not for me.
You’re probably thinking that maybe I should have just taken them out of the house for the holiday, and you’re probably right. The problem is, everything’s closed. Go to the closest national park (or any park), because they’re always open? It’s still a thousand degrees here in Texas, and we all turn into red-faced monsters when we’re outside sweating just from sitting. Take them shopping? No thanks. I’d rather do a hundred burpees. Plan fun activities with them? Well, the 8-year-old thought he’d take care of that himself, and now we have backyard dirt, unidentified hair and some kind of dead bug on the kitchen table because he wants to look at them under the microscope. I’d say that’s enough fun for one day.
So. Labor Day holiday? I beg to differ. My living room looks like a Pattern Play and puzzle explosion, the dining room table makes me want to cry, and let’s not even mention the kitchen table. *Shudder* On top of all that, the refrigerator is hanging on by a vine of grapes, because the kids are home and it’s never, ever closed when kids are home. (They’re going to regret it when they go back to school tomorrow and there’s nothing to eat in their lunches.)
So I’d like to propose that next Labor Day we make it a Parent Labor Day, too. Parents get to spend the whole holiday without their kids. We’re never off the clock when we’re a parent, so a holiday would be nice. We’re raising the future laborers, after all. We deserve a holiday from the work.
I look forward to your response.
Sincerely,
A very tired parent whose Labor Day really was a labor day, except way, way, waaaaaaaaay harder than work.
