by Rachel Toalson | Stuff Crash Test Kids say
6-year-old, to 3-year-old brother: I feel really angry at you, but I don’t want to hurt you.
9-year-old: I want to pee outside
Husband: No. You’re 9 years old. You can no longer pee outside when you’re 9 years old.
9-year-old: Why not?
Husband: Because—
9-year-old: Can I do it in the pits my brothers dug?
Husband: You’re really grouchy.
Me: I know. It’s been a hell of a morning.
9-year-old: You said a bad word.
Me: I don’t care.
9-year-old: Well, you’ll go where you said then.
Me: I said don’t eat yet. We haven’t prayed. Do you listen to anything comes out of my mouth?
3-year-old: No.
Me: What did I just say?
9-year-old: That I need to listen to you because one day it will help keep me safe. And so I’ll stay out of things. Like drugs.
6-year-old: We don’t have drugs in our house. We can’t get into drugs.
9-year-old: But we have alcohol.
Me: [shrug] It’s your dad’s.
9-year-old: Don’t worry, Mama, I’m not packing anything inappropriate.
Me: What would be inappropriate?
9-year-old: I don’t know. A poster that says, ‘This car used to be a butt.’
by Rachel Toalson | General Blog
I used to care a whole lot about EVERYTHING. And I mean, everything. I was quite a terrorist, if you ask Husband and my firstborn. I used to care what people thought about me and my parenting choices. I used to care about what my kids looked like, because, of course, they always had to be dressed impeccably—in the right shoes and the right shirts and the right pants, with their hair combed just so, because people needed to know we were killing it as parents of six. I used to care about getting places on time and how we looked walking the streets of our city and what my kids’ behavior said about me.
I know better now.
My kids are their own people, and while I’m the shepherd who guides them in their journeys, they are not exact replicas of me (nor would I want them to be. I’m far from perfect, too.).
What I have realized in my years of parenting is that I often care too much about what the people think. So I’ve resolved to stop caring. Here are the top things I will stop caring about:
1. I don’t care what you think about how many children swarm around me and call me Mama.
We get a whole lot of stares when we’re out in public, and we’re out in public a lot, because we like doing things together as a family. And I get it. We have a lot of kids, and they’re all boys. We’re quite a sight to see, honestly. I’ve started telling myself that people are staring at us because they’ve never seen boys so well behaved. But every now and then, someone walks up to shatter that perception, because the judgement is practically dripping from their eyes, and if it wasn’t dripping from their eyes, I would find it pretty quickly in the tone they use to say these words: “These all yours?” We’ll politely say, yes, they all belong to us. “My God,” they’ll say. “Ever heard of birth control?” or something along those no-filter lines, at which point we’ll walk away, because our kids deserve better than that. They really are good boys, and they don’t need to know how ugly the world can be just yet.
So I’ve stopped caring about what people think of my choice to have half a dozen kids. You can think what you want. You can think I’m ruining the planet because I’m contributing to overpopulation. You can think I’m irresponsible and selfish in this irresponsible and selfish choice. You can think it’s just a waste of space in our society. You can think I’m crazy or ignorant or unschooled or back woods or ridiculously ridiculous. I don’t even care.
2. I don’t care if you could never imagine yourself doing what I do on a daily basis.
Recently I read an essay urging the moms of the Internet to stop being so sensitive to the things that people say to them. Maybe it’s true that sometimes we get a little sensitive about the things people say. But I like to think that I can always tell when people mean well and when they don’t. There’s something in the eyes. I’ve always been good at reading the eyes, because I was a political reporter for a while, and I got really good at spotting the liars and the judgmental and the hostile. There’s always something in the eyes.
The ones who mean well, there’s a lot more forgiveness and grace for them, in my book. Go ahead. You can joke with me about how I have a basketball team with a sub or how I must have been going for a girl or how there are so many of them, everywhere, you can’t get away from them because I can see in your eyes that you mean well and you’re actually quite delighted.
But the ones who don’t mean well, they should just stop talking.
It’s often that we will hear from people, “I don’t know how you do it.” Mostly it’s said out of admiration, but every now and then, there’s a crazed person who makes a beeline for our family when we’re crossing the Alamo Plaza in the great city of San Antonio, just so they can say, “I can’t imagine having that many kids,” and look at our kids like they’re some kind of monsters who will take over the planet and eat the brains of all the much-more-capable-and-desirable adults.
Call me crazy, but I’m not a big fan of my boys standing in front of a person who makes them feel like there’s something wrong with who they inherently are, just because there are six of them. The oldest is getting old enough to pick up on this scorn. But you know what? I don’t care anymore if you think you could never imagine yourself doing laundry for six kids every week or teaching six kids every day or feeding six kids every hour. I don’t care if you think I was a nutcase for choosing this kind of life for myself. I don’t care. Shut your mouth and move along. This is family time. Not let’s-see-what-a-stranger-thinks-about-all-these-children time, despite what you may think.
3. I don’t care if the way my kids are dressed makes them look like orphans.
My kids dress themselves. That means many times, they don’t have matching shoes or they’re wearing one flip flop and one tennis shoe, because their solution for “I can’t find my other Iron Man tennis shoe” is to leave one tennis shoe on and let the other foot carry green flip flop. They have holes in their jeans, because they walk on their knees half the time. They have unbrushed hair, because they can’t be bothered to put a comb through their tangles, and I’m too busy feeding a baby or cleaning up another glass of spilled milk or hugging a 4-year-old. They have smudges on their faces, because they’re like magnets for dirt.
All of this doesn’t mean we don’t take good care of them. It just means kids get to dress however they want (with gentle suggestions from Mama and Daddy) and deal with the consequences of their choices. Like shorts in 40-degree weather.
So I don’t care what other people think about what my kids look like. I don’t care if you think we’re not taking care of them or if you wonder whether we’re those crazy people who don’t bathe our kids every day (we don’t). I don’t care if you think I’m a negligent mother (I’m not) or if you think I have no style (not much) or if you think they just get to run around like hoodlums outside (yeah, mostly).
4. I don’t care what you think my kids’ behavior says about me.
It’s amazing to me how much people forget about the day in, day out battles of raising children. I’ve heard already-raised-their-kids parents rake younger parents over the coals, because their kids never had a tantrum, and even if they did, it was only once, because blah blah blah. Whatever.
So my kid had a tantrum. Stop giving me the stink-eye. So my kid won’t stop whining and it’s super annoying. So my kid didn’t want to leave the park and kicked some of the mulch, and it got in his twin brother’s eye. Yeah, that’s not allowed, but you know what? It happens. Emotions can’t always be controlled perfectly. And just because I understand that doesn’t mean he’s not gong to deal with the consequences of his actions, but it does mean that I’m going to first empathize with my kid about how hard it is to leave a park when we’re having fun. Mind your own business and let me take care of it.
I don’t care if you think I’m too strict. I don’t care if you think I’m too lenient. I don’t care if you think I’m probably not the best one for this job. I don’t care. I’ll parent my kids however I want to parent them, because I’m the one who knows them best. I know their tendencies and their struggles and their pitfalls, and, most of all, I know their hearts. You don’t, in your one glance my way.
I don’t care what other people think about us anymore. I don’t care if you hate families and despise children, because you think they have nothing to offer the world. I know who we are, and I know who my kids are, and I know how much value they have to offer, and I know that they will one day change this world they’re living in.
That makes me glad I have six of them to raise.
by Rachel Toalson | Messy Mondays
We live in a much different world than we used to. This is a world where kids are kept close to home and parents call out other parents and, also, everyone and their dog has a food allergy.
It’s become the cool thing to be a kid with allergy. At least according to my kids and their friends.
I’m not trying to make light of a very real danger. I realize that there are many kids with severe allergies who could die if they sniff peanut butter or eggs or shellfish. I realize this is serious.
It’s just that the other day, my 6-year-old came home and said, “Mama, I found out I’m allergic to tomatoes today.”
“Oh, yeah?” I said, knowing better. This kid isn’t allergic to anything. None of our kids are. We’re super fortunate to have escaped the misery of food allergies. “How do you know?”
“Well, this girl was sitting next to me eating tomatoes, and I sneezed,” my boy said. His blue eyes looked up at me expectantly. I looked back at him expectantly, thinking surely this wasn’t the end of that story. Lip swelling? Upset stomach? Skin rash, maybe?
Wait. Just a sneeze?
“Maybe you just needed to sneeze,” I said.
“No,” he said. “I’m allergic.” And then he skipped off to tell all his neighborhood friends that he is allergic to tomatoes, blissfully unaware that we’d had tomatoes in our chicken salad last night and he hadn’t died overnight.
This is the same kid who once told our pediatrician that he had a milk allergy. The pediatrician raised his eyebrow in my direction, and I shook my head, and he smiled a little knowing smile, as if all the kids were saying things like that these days. And I wouldn’t put it past them. Maybe it really has become the cool thing to be a kid with allergies, according to the kids who don’t have them. The cool kids get to sit at their own table. The cool kids get to have special lunches and snacks. The cool kids get to have different treats than all the others at the holiday parties.
The cool kids get a little more attention from their teacher, who has to pay more attention to what they’re eating and what they’re touching and whether they’re having an allergic reaction to the marshmallows they used in today’s science experiment (I think I’ll tell the teachers my kids are allergic to marshmallows. I hate marshmallows. They make my kids CRAZY.). Every kid wants his teacher to pay more attention to just him. Attention is love. I get it.
All that can seem like a luxury to kids on the other side.
As much more logical adults, we know there’s nothing cool about having an allergy. We know it’s dangerous and inconvenient and super scary. The kids, well, they think that having an allergy is some kind of “I’m cool” badge, because, at the depths of their hearts, they’re all just looking to be distinct and unique and set apart from the rest of the herd. Or, at the very least, included in the cool kids group.
My 6-year-old has several classmates who have allergies. I don’t envy their parents at all, trust me. But sometimes I wish allergies didn’t even exist so my first grader didn’t come home every other day to tell me that he’s allergic to something else because his leg went numb after he ate it (pretty sure this is because of the way he sits on his legs at the cafeteria table) or because his nose got itchy or because he lost a hair on the back of his head, and he has the evidence to prove it.
Until our kids start understanding that allergies are something that could actually kill a person and that they’re taken very, very seriously, I think we’re probably going to see more and more of this silly phenomenon. I’ve seen it in more than just my kids. When a neighborhood kid comes over, he’s always got an allergy (even though I always check with parents). One kid is pretty insistent that he doesn’t eat carrots or celery or broccoli or cucumbers or beets or cauliflower, because he’s allergic to them all (guess he’ll go hungry at our house). Right now, to all these kids who don’t have them, allergies seem like a desirable thing—just like having glasses can seem like a desirable thing until you’re the kid who can’t see two feet in front of your face and your parents slap on you some ugly purple frames that reach all the way to your jawline and you have to wear them every day because you just realized the world is full of color and, later, you’ll try to hide all those pictures of your massive purple glasses from the man who’s just asked you to marry you, because, of course, he can never, ever, ever see you like that (I know what it’s like to be the un-cool kid. Thanks, Mom.).
So I’ve tried explaining to my son that having an allergy is no small thing, that it’s actually a really big deal, that we can’t just play around with those words, “I have an allergy,” because there are people who could actually die if they eat what they’re allergic to, but all he said was, “Well, my legs hurt when I eat salad. Maybe I’m allergic to lettuce.”
Well. He’s still young. I’ll wait until he’s old enough to spell “asphyxiation” before I try again.
Which means I might be waiting forever, because spell check just helped me out.
by Rachel Toalson | General Blog
Kids have amazing imaginations. They can listen to a story and ask to see the pictures, even though there are no pictures to see, because their brains are constantly working out what it is they’re seeing in the words. They’re able to imagine things like a cross between Batman and SpongeBob Square Pants, which we’ll call Squatman for our purposes, and they’re able to imagine what they’d like for dinner instead of this nasty spaghetti squash, and they can efficiently imagine a better world without parents like us telling them to go to bed and put those LEGOs away and eat all their vegetables.
But sometimes their imaginations can come back to bite them. Say, when they’re in trouble and they are locked in an erroneous belief system.
Here are some of the most ridiculous things that kids believe:
1. They’ll never find out.
Every day, when I lay my twins down for naps, I post up a spot right outside their room, mostly because they cannot be trusted, even at 4 years old, to be in their room by themselves. Sure, we’ve cleared it of everything but beds and blankets and pillows, but I tried it out last week, that leaving them alone for nap time, because Husband and I were trying to design a book cover for a new book release, and they managed to pile their blankets and pillows on the floor of their closet, and, even though all the clothes are hung fifteen feet in the air, pulled down all their brother’s 12-month clothes and tried to squeeze into every shirt.
What I’ve noticed about my twins is they believe that if I’m not in the room with them, I’ll never know what they’ve done. If I so happen to leave my post for a minute, because I’ve finished a passage of the book I wanted to read and I’m going to get another one, they will sneak on silent feet out of their room and into their brothers’ room. They won’t even have the foresight to shut the door, so when I come back out, there they are standing by their oldest brother’s desk, next to the forbidden art supplies he got for Christmas. They’ll look at me like a deer in the headlights and go completely motionless, as if maybe I won’t see them if they stand perfectly still.
Kids believe that if we’re not right there with them, we’ll never know what it is they’ve done. Well they’re wrong. I know every time, kids. I know when you pee off the side of the van because you think it’s a great idea; and I know when you’ve had a couple of extra treats, even if you round off that cookie so it looks like a mouse has nibbled the sides of it; and I know when you sit down and stand up and when you’re awake and asleep. I’m like Santa Claus on steroids. I have eyes everywhere. So don’t even think about it.
2. If I can’t see you, you can’t see me.
So many times this has happened. The twins are in their room, I’m sitting right outside their room, but I’m hidden behind the crib, and they can’t see me. So they think that means I can’t see them. I get a kick out of this, because they’re usually headed into the bathroom to try to find another tube of that yummy mint toothpaste they ate this morning. I’ll let them come all the way out, still oblivious to my presence, and when they’re dead even with me, I’ll call out their name. They’ll startle and go screaming back to their room.
Gotta do what you gotta do. Natural consequences and all.
3. Even though we’ve done the same thing every night for the last six years of my life, tonight is probably different.
This is just ridiculously ridiculous. We run our house on a strict routine. Every single night we have dinner time and after-dinner-chores time and bath time and then story time and then mama-reading-a-chapter-book-out-loud time and then silent reading time and then prayer time and then snuggle time and then bed time. We’ve done this every single night since the oldest was born nine years ago. And still the boys seem to think that somewhere in there is a jump-on-the-couches-naked time and a play-freeze-tag-in-the-house time and a throw-books-in-the-air time. Nope. That’s never been a part of the routine, kids. Get back in your chairs, open your books and read.
4. If I complain/scream/whine enough, I’ll get exactly what I want.
You know what complaining/screaming/whining actually makes me want to do? It makes me want to take away anything I’ve ever given my kid in the first place (life being the exception. I don’t want to take away their lives). Doing it longer or louder or more annoyingly is only going to guarantee that the crazy will come unleashed. And I can’t be held responsible for whatever happens when the crazy is unleashed. Whoops. Sorry I just threw away all your LEGOs. You were complaining too much about how all your friends have the newest Minecraft set and how you really think, because you’re so great at school and all, that you should be able to get the new one, too, and can I take you to the store right this minute so I can buy you the latest $90 set?
Whining/screaming/complaining doesn’t work.
5. Making myself into a boneless puddle means they’ll let me stay at the park longer.
“Let me stay at the park” could be replaced with anything a kid wants. It’s just that the park experience happened more recently than anything else.
You know, we get these crazy ideas sometimes, like, “Hey, let’s a have a picnic out at the park and so the boys can play after they’re done eating.” Which ends up more like, “Hey, let’s have a picnic out at the park so we can drag one of the boys kicking and screaming away from the slide he wanted to go down one more time.”
With six boys, it’s highly probable that I’ll have at least one of them who’s not ready to leave the park when it’s time to go home. It doesn’t matter if we’re going home to eat dinner or if we’re going to another friend’s house for a playdate or if we’re doing something fun like seeing a movie and we’re going to be late if we don’t leave right this minute. They’re not ready to leave, so they’re going to collapse into a boneless puddle, at which time their daddy or I will drag them to the car, trying to ignore the way the asphalt is tearing at their jeans—not so much because we’re concerned about scraping their knees (natural consequences and all) but because those jeans still have to make it through one more kid.
What turning into a boneless puddle really means is that I get to work on my strength training for a second time today, and, also, we’re not coming to the park again for at least a year.
6. That’s not going to hurt me.
There are so many times this comes into play when you’re the parent of boys. But the one that sticks out most, right now, today, is when my boys are sliding head-first down our stairs, just for the fun of it. When the stairs snap into their rib cages, they shout their laughter, and they can’t stop. It’s the most hilarious thing ever, apparently, to have a rounded bit of wood jab into their internal organs and bruise them from the inside out. I watch this, horrified, from the bottom of the stairs. Someone is going to break something, but they are disturbingly unafraid. They have no idea how much it will hurt if this little slide goes wrong.
This erroneous thought also drives them to play bounce-wrestling games on the trampoline and ride bikes without helmets and soar down our cul-de-sac hill lying flat on a skateboard.
7. Vacuum cleaners can suck you up (or other crazy terrors).
When our oldest was little, around 3, he was scared of the vacuum cleaner. He would have nightmares and tell us all about them. In his nightmares, there was such thing as a vacuum cleaner that could suck up a person, and he was terrified that our vacuum cleaner would come into his room in the middle of the night and suck him up inside it. The vacuum cleaner could not be anywhere near his bedroom or he would spend sixteen hours awake instead of sleeping. We could not turn it on without one parent being very near him so that he could clutch an arm or a leg or whatever appendage may be closest. Ear, eye, lips. Didn’t matter. As long as he was assured someone was there protecting him.
I remember being more terrified of escalators than a vacuum cleaner, but maybe that’s just proof that I need to get my kids out more.
Fortunately, as kids grow older, they give up these ridiculous beliefs. They learn better. They do better.
So maybe it’s cute while it lasts. Or something like that.
by Rachel Toalson | Messy Mondays
People are fascinated by twins. When my twins were young, people would stop me in the middle of the grocery store so they could touch the faces of these boys who looked exactly alike. And now that they’re 4, not much has changed.
Most of the time those people who stop us and exclaim over how cute our twins are say they always wanted twins. And I always find myself thinking the same thing: No you didn’t. Because, you see, everybody likes the IDEA of twins, but when it comes to the day-after-day-it’s-never-going-to-end work of getting two babies through the first year of life and potty training two at a time and dealing with 3-year-old twinanigans? You don’t even know what you’re saying.
My twins are identical. They share the same noses, the same eyes, the same skin, the same DNA. One of them has a mole on the backside of his left arm, near the top, and that’s the only way you can tell them apart—unless you’re their mother, of course. One of them writes with his right hand, the other writes with the left. They complete each other in every way.
That’s part of the problem. Since these guys were tiny little babies, they’ve completed each other. Our first night home from the hospital I tried feeding one while the other slept, and as soon as the first one started slurping, the second one woke up and screamed his head off for half an hour because he was starving. I changed my strategy after that hellish night.
Our twins have always shared a room, because when one is without the other, they go wandering, looking for whatever is missing that they can’t quite place. And then, when they find each other, their world is complete again.
But let me just tell you. Don’t let those cute little smiles fool you. These guys can be little devils.
They will tear apart a room in three seconds flat, before you even have time to high-tail it up the stairs to see what all the thumping is about. They will destroy something right after taking it out of the box. Just ask their remote control cars they got for Christmas or the 9-year-old’s silly putty he brought home from school. Ask Husband what they did to his iPad when he wasn’t looking, even though they’re not allowed to touch it.
When they were still in diapers, my twins thought it was funny to wait until after we’d tucked them in and closed their door for just a minute of peace and quiet, to poop and then sit up in their beds and quietly paint all the walls they could reach brown. I’m not sure which of them had this brilliant idea, but I bet the look of horror that painted Mama and Daddy’s face like their droppings painted the walls was probably the most hilarious thing they’d ever seen. And we never learned our lesson, because we’re foolish and, also, desperate for a little peace and quiet, like I said, so they did it for three days straight before we decided to put them in footie pajamas so they couldn’t do it again. They were thwarted for two days and then they figured out how to wiggle out of those footie pajamas. We cut the feet off and zipped them up backward so they couldn’t let themselves out this time. That’s when they figured out how to unzip the back just enough to wiggle out of the neck hole and do the deed again. So we cut slits in the neck of the pajamas and zip-tied the zipper to the neck so they couldn’t possibly, no matter what they tried, get it off. That’s when they figured out how to climb out of their cribs, meet each other in the middle and wriggle, fantastically, out of a three-inch hole and do their deed yet again. I thought we were never going to get through that mess. Pardon the pun.
And then we were finally, finally, finally out of that fun stage, and it was time for the potty training. I’ve blocked that from my memory, it was so traumatic.
Now here we are, trying to find our way through twinanigans that have grown much more sophisticated since the paint-with-poop days. Just when we think we’re one step ahead of them, they’ve figured something else out. We fixed their sliding door closet with a door hinge that would keep them from opening it, and they pushed their dresser across their room to reach it. We took the dresser out, removed the doors of the closet and raised their clothes so high I have to stand on tiptoe to reach them (and I’m five feet, nine inches tall), and they figured out how to stack their pillows and folded-up blankets to climb up the wall and reach the hangers (I think they’re part Spider-Man.) so they could fling them all over the floor. So we took all their clothes out of their closet. Problem solved.
I opened the door after nap time that day I thought the problem was surely solved to see one 3-year-old dressed in his 6-month-old brother’s shirt and pants, unaware that the five inches of leg sticking out below the pants was a dead giveaway that he’d gotten into the clothes again.
I have no idea how they do all this. It’s not like I’m not paying attention or something. I mean, sometimes I’m distracted by other crises in my house, but I’ve always got one eye on the twins, because I know what twinanigans can do to a house and a life. I know they are the ones who will steal out of their rooms when we’re not looking so they can bring back their brother’s LEGO creation balanced precariously on the banister and play with it in bed. I know they’re the ones who will stash a permanent marker under their mattress and, when the lights have all gone out for the evening, will take to painting the place with their spider-people. I know they are the ones who will wander in the middle of the night and eat a whole tube of toothpaste or a whole container of vitamins that’s clearly not child-proofed while the rest of the house snores blissfully on.
I know they are the ones who will try to play with their favorite forbidden toy—the plunger—and end up flinging potty water all over the bathroom walls. I know they are the ones who will be set free from their backpack leashes, for only a couple of seconds, and disappear into an elevator in the blink of an eye and stay missing for half an hour before the elevator finally dings and they come running out talking about a sister they met. I know they are the ones who will run out into the middle of the street when a car is coming and not feel the least bit afraid, because they have no sense of impending death.
They’ve pulled over tables on themselves; they’ve tried to climb up bookshelves to get this one book they wanted, because they wanted to do it by themselves; they’ve marked their face with my mascara and lied about it, they’ve stuck their hand in the toilet with floating poop and then wiped their hand all over their shirt (every other day), they’ve figured out how to open a medicine bottle, they’ve helped each other reach the cookies I hid in the microwave, they’ve stood on each other’s shoulders to empty the toy cabinet, they’ve hit each other across the face and then hugged each other in the very next second.
They are relentless.
I didn’t have a single strand of gray hair before I had my twins. Now I find a new one every day, and they’re only 3. We’re in for a long ride.
But even though they’re hard, even though every day I wonder how much more of their twinanigans I can take, there is something else that twins bring to a life, and it is this: bright spots here and there, when they’re laughing hysterically with each other over some inside joke or when they’re coloring together and one keeps the other from marking on the floor so he doesn’t get in trouble or when they’re climbing into my lap for a story.
In moments like these, it’s easy to see why so many people tell me they always wanted twins. Twins are glamorous. They’re special. There is nothing like it. And, when it’s all said and done, it’s fascinating to watch two people who look exactly alike discovering their world, together, in their completely separate ways.
I did not expect twins to be so difficult. I did not expect them to be so wonderful, either.
by Rachel Toalson | Stuff Crash Test Kids say
Woman: Are you guys four yet?
3-year-old: No, I’m three.
Woman: Is your birthday coming up?
3-year-old: Yeah.
Woman: And then you’ll be, what, seven?
3-year-old: Yeah. Because we eat a lot of food.
9-year-old: I feel really angry that you guys are hovering around me like bees hover around flowers.
Husband: You have to ask two serious questions and one silly one.
9-year-old: Like when was the last time you tooted?
Husband: Sure.
9-year-old: Two seconds ago is how I would answer that question.
Husband:
9-year-old:
Husband: It’s time to evacuate the dinner table.
9-year-old: Daddy, I’m feeling really sick. Can you squeeze the toothpaste out onto my toothbrush?
Husband: If you hurt one of your brothers again you lose technology time indefinitely.
9-year-old: If I’m angry, can I tickle them instead?
Husband: I think you should just not touch them.
9-year-old: I think I’ll tickle them.
6-year-old: I think I would like that better.
