by Rachel Toalson | Messy Mondays
It’s a celebratory day when kids are able to buckle their own seat belts and pour their own glasses of milk and bathe themselves and cook their own food (wait, when does this happen again? I’M READY ANYTIME, KIDS).
When they’re little, we spend so much of our days doing every single thing for them that every tiny little mastery feels like a major victory.
But in order for them to learn how to do things for themselves, in order for them to achieve autonomy, there is this frightening limbo between beginning and mastering when we must let them practice.
I say it’s frightening, because I know. Here’s what working toward autonomy looks like in our home:
Pouring milk
The 8-year-old: Check the level on the milk. If it’s less than half-filled, overcorrect, because you got this. If it’s too full, try anyway, and spill a whole ocean where you can let your Lego man swim before you try to clean it up. And by cleaning it up, you mean wiping it toward the floor so it soaks not only the counter but inside the drawers and cabinets, too. Conveniently forget to clean up the spills you can’t see so your mom will find it—not with her eyes, but with her nose—three days later.
The 5-year-old: Only pour from a gallon that is less than half-filled, because you’re careful like that.
The 4-year-old: Pour anytime you feel like it, but do it from the floor. Wipe up the mess you’ve made with a paper towel but no cleaner so the stickiness will steal someone’s socks tomorrow. Laugh hysterically when it does.
Tying shoes
The 8-year-old: Tie one, and then get really frustrated when the other one doesn’t tie as easily because everyone is talking. Tell everyone to be quiet so you can concentrate and then try again. Tell them to quit looking at you. Make three good attempts, and then take off your shoe that just won’t tie today and throw it across the room. Say you’ll go to school with only one shoe on. You don’t care. Change your mind five minutes before you’re supposed to leave, after you’ve forgotten where the offending shoe landed when you threw it. Your dad will find it and help you put it on. Unless you call him a git (British term, mildly derogatory, made popular by Harry Potter. Means “a foolish or contemptible person).
The 5-year-old: Don’t even try. Your mom will do it.
Packing up
8-year-old: Look in your room for your agenda. Complain that you can’t find it, even though it’s sitting just beside your desk, right by the four thousand Lego pieces you dumped out last night and “forgot” to clean up. Say it’s gone forever. Say someone must have stolen it. Say you’ll never be able to write down your school assignments again. Ever. Say “You must have moved it,” when your mom comes downstairs with it.
5-year-old: Let your mom know you can’t find your red folder, then laugh when she pulls it out from under your lunch box, the same place it always is in the mornings, because it’s waiting for you to pack it up.
Sweeping the floor
8-, 5- and 4-year-olds: Only sweep a square area of four tiles across and four tiles down. Don’t even try to get under the table, where all the food is. It’s too hard, and your knee is hurting. You think you might have broken it.
Wiping the table
8-, 5- and 4-year-olds: Push all the extra food to the floor by the sponge. Be sure to leave streaks all over the table, because you didn’t want to use the cleaner, OR leave a lake because you had a little too much fun spraying the cleaner and the sponge is too soaked to absorb anymore.
Doing dishes
8-, 5- and 4-year-olds: All the silverware must fit into as few slots as possible, even though there are six slots and three that are still empty. There is no rhyme or reason to putting dishes in; just throw them randomly in whatever space is available. After all, the dishwasher is like a car wash for plates and bowls. Don’t worry, Mama. It’ll all get clean.
Putting laundry away
8-year-old: Hanging clothes don’t have to be hung up, exactly. They can be stuffed into the underwear drawer, because it’s not full, and all the other random empty drawers in the room.
5-year-old: Don’t pay attention to the labels your mom put up in the closet. Just put your clothes wherever you feel like putting them, even though you share your closet with two other brothers. That way, when you dress for school, you’ll have a legitimate reason for dressing in a shirt two sizes too large. “It was on my side,” you’ll say.
4-year-old: Get mad trying to hang up shirts, and throw your hangers across the floor so some of them break and your parents will help you hang up the rest.
2-year-olds: Rearrange (and by rearrange, you mean empty) the pajama drawer eight times a day because your parents let you put clothes in it once.
Putting on shoes
2-year-olds: It doesn’t matter if shoes don’t match or if they’re different sizes. Just put them on. Shoes are shoes are shoes. Stop trying to match them and put them on the right feet, parents.
Cleaning your room
8-year-old: Make sure all the books that are supposed to go on the bookshelves in your room end up on your bed instead. That way your mom won’t be able to find the library books when they’re due. Push everything else in the closet and shut the door. You don’t need the closet anyway, now that all your clothes are stuffed in drawers.
Bathing
8-, 5- and 4-year-olds: You really only need to wash your hair, your belly and your feet. Everything else is already magically clean.
Dressing
8-year-old: Who cares if the sweatpants you’re wearing aren’t yours but belong to your 2-years-younger brother and look more like capris than pants? They were in your room, stuffed in a drawer, so they’re obviously YOURS. Make sure you leave your pajamas on the floor so they won’t make it into the laundry and you can complain two days after laundry day that you don’t have any more pajamas. Also, make sure you forget to put your shoes on before getting in the car, because you just know there’s a pair in the car (there isn’t). And don’t check to be sure until you arrive at your destination.
I know that eventually they will get good at all this, because practice makes perfect.
Right?
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 (which I don’t want to talk about, so don’t even ask). 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 skunk smell 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 that 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 over-stimulation 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 your brother just did to you.” 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…
by Rachel Toalson | Messy Mondays
Kids are fun, aren’t they? I could think of a whole lot of other words to describe them, too. So dang cute, wonderful, charming, hilarious, imaginative, delusional, maddening, nasty, beastly, so dang annoying.
In the course of a day, there are a whole lot of things that make their way through my brain but, thankfully, remain trapped there in the crevices of a brain that has been dissected and digested by zombies children. Well, okay. They make it into my diary.
Here are some of my most private confessions. Don’t judge. I’m a stressed out mom. With a half-eaten brain.
1. When your kid says “I hate you,” and you want to say, yeah, well, I don’t really like you all that much right now, either.
(But you don’t, because kids are snowflakes, and you wouldn’t want to crush them.)
2. When your kid says he wants to run away and you want to say, “Here’s a sandwich. Make it last. Practice rationing.”
(But you don’t, because the neighbors would call CPS.)
3. When your kid says, “I don’t like that,” before he’s tasted dinner and you want to say, “Then you get a big bowl of nunya for dinner. And it’s delicious.”
(But you don’t, because you wouldn’t want to create an unhealthy relationship with food. Kids are so fragile nowadays.)
4. When your kid gets hit by his brother and you want to say, “Welp, you deserved that.”
(But you don’t, because kids need endless empathy to grow into healthy adults. Your brother hit you because you were yelling in his face, egging him on? I’m so sorry, baby.)
5. When your kid complains about doing chores and you want to say, “This is my payment for having you. Now get to work.”
(But you don’t, because child labor is not okay.)
6. When your kid says, “I threw up a little bit,” and you want to say, “Yeah, well, you’re out of sick days, kid. Suck it up.”
(But you don’t, because puke, everywhere. You don’t even have words anymore.)
7. When your 3-year-old argues with his brother for 15 minutes over whether or not the moon is a piece of the sun broken off, and you want to say, “What the hell does it matter?”
(But you don’t, because hell is a bad word. And 3-year-olds? Sponges.)
8. When your kid pushes that one button and you want to karate-kid his face.
(But you don’t, because, well, CPS.)
9. When your kid won’t stop copying you and you want to Duct tape his mouth shut.
(But you don’t, because you can’t find the tape you left in the drawer, which means someone probably already got to it and used it for sketchy purposes. You’ll find it when you try to lift the seat on your toilet. Ha ha. Very funny.)
10. When your kid asks, “Are we almost there?” before you’re even out of the neighborhood and you want to turn the car back around, park it in your driveway and say, “Yep. We are now.”
(But you don’t, because you’d rather have them all strapped in seats than running wild in the house.)
11. When your kid says you’re the worst parent ever and you want to say, “Ding, ding ding! We have a winner. Oh, wait. Nope, you’re not winning any awards for best kid in the world, either.”
(But you don’t, because self esteem. Snowflakes. Fragile. You don’t want to break them.)
(But seriously. Karate kid. And rationing. And suck it up. WORST. KID. EVER. right now.)
by Rachel Toalson | Crash Test featured, Crash Test Parents, General Blog
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 demand 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.
[Tweet “The best parts of life demand hard work, dedication and perseverance. Parenting’s on that list.”]
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 | Crash Test featured, Crash Test Parents, General Blog
A few weeks ago I got a text from my sister, who had her third baby in February. The text said, “Tell me you have days when you just can’t handle it. When walking out of the house is all you can do to survive. I just need to hear it from another human.”
I laughed out loud, even though I knew she was dead serious. And in my head were responses like “every damn day” and “just this morning” and “on a minute-by-minute basis.”
Parenting is hard. It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done, and I used to run six miles every morning in 10,000-pound humidity before commuting an hour to downtown’s Houston Chronicle office. I used to marathon-train on 10 miles of hills pushing a double baby stroller that carried a 4-year-old and a 3-year-old. I used to work for a narcissist.
Parenting is still the hardest thing I’ve ever done.
There are so many hours of my day that I just feel like giving up and hitch-hiking to downtown San Antonio’s Riverwalk, where Husband and I had a life before children—a life that didn’t include a panic attack every time a kid steps too close to the edge of the path and I imagine having to jump into that dirty black water to save him.
Like the morning last week, when the 3-year-old twins went outside into our very safe (normally) backyard while I transferred a load of laundry from the washing machine to the dryer. Two minutes, tops. That’s all it took. By the time I finished, one of the twins had come back inside, and the whole house smelled like gasoline.
“Why does the house smell like gasoline?” I said, to no one in particular. The twin looked at me. I looked at him. He had his guilty eyes on.
“What were you doing out there?” I said.
“Nuffing,” he said.
I knew it was definitely something, because of those guilty eyes. A mom always knows, after all.
His twin brother came in smelling like a gas pump, so I looked out on the deck, where they didn’t even have the foresight to hide what they’d been doing. There, on a deck chair, was their daddy’s gas can used to fill up the lawn mower the three times a year he mows. That gas can is stored behind a locked door. A locked and sealed door that somehow, SOMEHOW, these Dennis the Menaces had cracked open in less than two minutes.
They poured gasoline (less than half a gallon, for those who are concerned) all over the back deck, the grass and themselves. It’s a good thing no one in my house smokes, because we all would have been blown to high heaven.
I put them both in the bath (which was not on the schedule for the morning) while the baby stayed downstairs in his jumper seat wailing because he doesn’t like to be alone, and washed them, rinsed them, scrubbed them, rinsed them and washed them again. Husband sprayed off the deck (which also wasn’t on the schedule for the morning) and saturated all the grass, because a Texas summer hits 4,000 degrees, and we were afraid the sun might make the gasoline-drenched grass spontaneously combust and blow us all to high heaven anyway.
That morning was one of those give-up days, because there’s no way to be one step ahead in my house. There’s no way I can fully toddler-proof every room. There’s no way I can keep them out of every single thing they find to amuse themselves. It would take 23 of me.
That morning I wanted to walk out and let them fend for themselves in gasoline scented clothes that spread their stench all over the house in less than two seconds.
I used to feel guilty when feelings like this crept up. I used to beat myself up for sometimes wishing that they just weren’t twins, that there weren’t two of them ALL THE DANG TIME, that they weren’t so insatiably curious and 3 years old and nearly impossible to parent right now.
But there is something important I’ve learned in my years of parenting: Just because there are moments when we want to run away, when we want to flat-out give up, when we want to trade our kids for easier kids for just this little moment in time so we can catch up and learn to appreciate them again, it doesn’t mean that we don’t still love them with a love that is never-ending.
These little, irrational humans can be the best and worst people we know on any given day at any given moment.
There are days when I want to sit down and color next to my 3-year-olds, because they’ve just been playing so well together and the morning’s disasters have been minimal, and, gosh, I just love them so much, and then there are mornings when I want to put them on Craig’s list’s free page (I’d have to lie to really sell the idea, though. Something like “Two well behaved twins, of undetermined age.” Because what kind of crazy person would want two 3-year-olds voluntarily?)
There are hours when I love to comb through those old picture albums that show these two hooked up to machines because they were premature and remember how I fretted and cried and tried my best to help them learn how to eat, and there are days when those first moments feel like entire lifetimes apart from this moment, when they stuck their whole arm in the just-used toilet to see what poop floating in pee feels like (They already know. We’ve done this drill before.).
There are minutes when I pull them into my lap and kiss all over their faces until they’re giggling uncontrollably, because they’re getting so big and so fun, and then there are minutes when I’m half-heartedly holding their big brother away from them so he doesn’t clobber them for marking all over his journal with a giant red permanent marker they found lying around somewhere (who keeps giving us permanent markers? Please stop.).
Parenting is not for the weak. This is the hardest responsibility we will ever have in our lives. Raising another human being to be a decent person is not easy, and there are many times along our journeys when we will feel like giving up and giving in and giving out.
It just comes with the territory.
So I fire off my response to my sweet sister. “Yes,” I say. “Just about every day. Doesn’t mean you’re a bad mother.”
Because it doesn’t.
These moments when we feel the tension between wanting to give up and knowing we can’t make us stronger parents. They make us better people. They drag us into a deeper understanding of love.
Good thing, too. Because my toddler just figured out how to open a can of paint Husband left unguarded and now the pantry wall has a Thermal Spring scribble-masterpiece drying on it.
I’m going to be one amazing person by the time this is all over.
by Rachel Toalson | Crash Test featured, Crash Test Parents
There is this weird thing that happens when you have multiple children.
You only add them one at a time, so you start out so well. Setting up that nursery in old-fashioned airplanes. Displaying books on the dresser so they’re all nice and neat and you can see each one. Organizing outings to the park and the pool and the children’s museum with all his little infant buddies.
And then you have more children. You start letting things fall through the cracks. You start losing track of time. You start slacking when it comes to things like…birthdays.
Not long ago we celebrated our third son’s fifth birthday. I forgot to plan his birthday party.
So I scheduled it for two weeks after his actual birth day and then had to listen to him every single morning say, “Well, I guess I’m not having a birthday party this year” after I answered the initial, “Is TODAY my birthday party?” with a negative. If only 5-year-olds weren’t so bad at time relativity.
“Your birthday party isn’t today,” I’d say. “It’s in another ten days.”
“So tomorrow?”
He can count to one hundred, but he can’t count the ten days between the day he asked and the day with the box that says “BIRTHDAY PARTY” in big blue letters on the calendar beside the fridge.
One day he took the guilt a little farther. “I didn’t get a cupcake for breakfast on my birthday,” he said.
It’s tradition in our house that the birthday boy gets a cupcake for breakfast on his actual birth day. He got cinnamon toast this year, because I’m drowning doing just fine.
“But you had cinnamon toast,” I said. He looked at me like he was the most neglected boy in the world.
“We’ll plan what we’re having for your birthday party tonight,” I said. “How about that?”
He perked up. “How much longer until after dinner?” he said.
We ate our dinner, did all the chores, and then sat down at the table to plan. I had my pen and notebook at the ready.
“What theme do you want?” Husband asked.
“What’s a theme?” our 5-year-old said.
“Like Robin Hood or Treasure Island or Star Wars,” our 8-year-old bookworm said.
“I want Penguins of Madagascar with ninjas,” the birthday-boy-for-the-last-week said.
Husband and I looked at each other with the same “What the—” expression on our faces. But I knew there was a solution. We live in an artsy fartsy world, after all.
I opened Pinterest.
What a mistake.
Now, I used to be a pretty crafty person. When my 8-year-old started school, I sent him there with five reusable napkins and five handkerchiefs complete with a monogrammed picture drawn by all the members of his family so he wouldn’t feel lonely during the school day. I know. I’m an overachiever. But no longer. When the next-in-line started school, he was lucky to get two of each. The third starts in a little more than three weeks. I’ve done all of zero.
My closet is full of material I always intended to use for on-the-go crayon bags and custom backpacks and notebook covers. There are baskets filled with ripped-up books I plan on using for craft projects someday (I’ve been waiting three years for someday. So far.). I have a bag that sits beside the living room couch for when the kids are all serenely playing and I can take out that blanket I’ve been crocheting for five years (I haven’t touched the blanket, because boys hardly ever serenely play).
But the feed for a “Penguins of Madagascar party” was crazy. Homemade cakes with 3D penguins made from icing, standing up on top. Elaborate crafts that we could have for all the kids at the party (and who would clean up the mess? Me.). Coloring pages and games and party favors with penguins hand-drawn on the sides of cups.
I scrolled through. Can’t do this. Can’t do this. Won’t do this.
Shouldn’t have even looked.
When the oldest boy had his Star Wars party last year, I made Ham Solo sandwiches and Wookie cookies and Yoda soda. This year I just wanted to bake chocolate cookies and call them bombs.
I felt a little guilty about it. I couldn’t help it.
We live in such a Pinterest-perfect world. People post those elaborate cakes where 3D characters from The Jungle Book are standing up on a no-lines-in-the-icing cake, striking their elaborate pounce poses, and I wonder how anyone plans a birthday anymore with pressure like this.
“Think you could do this?” I asked Husband, pointing to an impressive cake, because he’s the artist.
“Absolutely not,” he said. “Who has time for that?”
Exactly. Who has time for that? Last time we tried to decorate a cake in the kitchen, the 8-year-old tried to walk up stairs in roller blades and Spider-Man’s mask came out looking more like a face behind bars. Last time we tried to make our own pin-the-mustache-on-the-Lorax game, a little brother found some scissors and cut up all the school papers left in the basket beside the table. Last time we tried to make those hand-lettered food labels the twins discovered the plunger and a toilet their brothers forgot to flush.
So it’s not a party unless it’s a Pinterest party? Unless we spend two whole days making sure everything is perfect? Unless someone can tell us what that blob on the cake is supposed to be?
No thanks.
Pinterest can go take a walk all the way to Antarctica. Hey, Pinterest: Don’t let the ice numb your backside on the way out.
I’ll take my imperfect party with the rowdy kids and the penguin box game we never finished and the cake balls we called eggs any day.
See, the thing is, our kids have no idea. They have no idea. They hardly notice the clothes they took off and left all over the floor or the shoes they pretty much ran right out of or the way they smell when they come back in from playing outside in the middle of a Texas summer. Do we really think they’re gong to notice the way the eyes on that penguin-that-doesn’t-really-look-like-a-penguin are lopsided? Do we really think they’re going to say there just weren’t enough decorations at their party? Do we really think they’re going to point out the way the cake sinks in the middle?
No. They’re going to shove that cake in their pie holes. We should, too (well, maybe use a fork), because it’s dang delicious.
When my son’s party was over, I pulled him close and asked him if he enjoyed it.
“Oh, yeah,” he said. “It was the best party ever.”
And he meant it.
He started to run off and then turned back around. “Can I have another poop cupcake, Mama?” he said.
“Poop cupcake?” I said. “That doesn’t sound very tasty.”
I thought he was joking, because, well, boys and jokes. The grosser the better. But my boy was dead serious. He pointed to two cupcakes left on the table, each with chocolate icing swirled up high.
I laughed so hard I cried.
Guess those pretty cupcakes weren’t as pretty as I thought.
(Photo by Sheelah Brennan on Unsplash)
