by Rachel Toalson | Messy Mondays
So much for a yell-free year. I screwed that up at about 10 a.m. New Year’s Day.
Husband and I keep it no secret that we own a megaphone and use it frequently, because the noise six boys can make on a daily basis is like a thousand frightened elephants crashing through Stonehenge. The house trembles with the sound of it. And in order for our hourly instructions to be heard over all this trumpeting and stomping and crashing, we make sure our house is well stocked with Energizer D batteries and the megaphone is within reach of parent hands (definitely not kid hands. They don’t need any help in the louder department.).
So, on the rare occasion that the megaphone is nowhere to be found, or the batteries have run out and there are no more, yelling is necessary. Yelling to be heard above the voices of boys when they’re playing together. Yelling to be heard over their whispers, even, when they’re telling secrets (My kids are the loudest whisperers I’ve ever heard in my life). Yelling to get their attention, yelling to save them from dying, yelling to announce that dinner’s ready, because they surely won’t want to miss a single meal.
I’m not talking about this kind of yelling. This kind of yelling is necessary, at least in my home.
No, I’m talking about the kind of yelling that grabs the fire of anger and flings it at walls and doors and, mostly, kid-faces.
See, we’d been doing a whole lot of it in the last months of 2015. We’re not angry people, but boys, six of them, can quite often be maddening people. And, honestly, we were a little worn out. And we’d sometimes had enough of “whatever” before the kids had had enough. And there are a thousand excuses.
But when we looked around at our children during their two weeks (and an extra day!!!) off school, we realized (yet again) that yelling is not the answer. It’s true that sometimes we didn’t get enough sleep, because we had too much on our mind or the baby woke with a snot tree growing from his nose or the 9-year-old burst through our bedroom door at 3 a.m. to say his tummy hurt five seconds before yesterday’s pork chops splattered my face. It’s true that money’s tight right now and we’re building careers from the ground up and we’re balancing household responsibilities and we’re raising SIX BOYS who don’t often understand what it means to “just be quiet, please. For one second.”
I didn’t want to be that parent, though.
So we went around our table, asking boys what in the world we could possibly do besides yelling (even the necessary kind). How could we get their attention? What would make them stop and listen? How could we better express our momentary anger? What could boys do that might help parents do that might help boys do (because this parent-child relationship is a symbiotic cycle.)? We made our plan. We put it in place.
And still we failed on Day One.
We can tear ourselves up about something like this. We can believe we’re not good parents, because we slipped up that one time today, or those two times or those five thousand times. We can feel like maybe our kid is going to be forever messed up because we can’t seem to make it through a nighttime routine, with its getting out of bed a thousand times, without yelling at them to “JUST STAY PUT FOR GOD’S SAKE.” But the truth is, we’re only ever going to be good enough parents. That means we’re not ever going to be perfect. There are people who will tell us we should be perfect. They’re wrong.
It’s all well and good to make it our goal not to yell. It’s great to have a plan and put that plan in place. It’s great to take steps along the journey to where we want to be.
“We will never, ever, not even on our best days, be perfect at this parenting thing. Because we’re human. Because we’re raising humans.
So we can stop making ourselves feel so bad for being imperfect people. We can stop beating ourselves up for slipping up.
You know what we get to do when we yell in front of our kids because they’re losing their minds with the LEGOs, tossing them all up into the air like monkeys throwing poo, and we don’t really want to take down our ponytail tonight and feel the fourteen tiny little dragon-claw pieces spill out onto a floor and disappear to places where they’ll be found in the dead of night on a half-asleep trip to the bathroom? We get to show our kids what it looks like to make amends. We get to show them what it sounds like to offer an apology for a mistake we made (because yelling is a mistake in my personal parenting playbook). We get to show them that we aren’t perfect, so they don’t have to be perfect, either.
[Tweet “We’ll make plenty of mistakes in our parenting. Good thing imperfection fosters resilience.”]
I feel better already.
by Rachel Toalson | Stuff Crash Test Kids say
Husband: You’re being a pest.
8-year-old: Well, then, call pest control.
Me [under my breath]: How I wish it were that easy.
Me [Turning out the lights in their bedroom]: You lost the privilege of a longer reading time, because you’re playing instead of reading.
3-year-old: I want to read.
Me: You had a chance to read. Now you have to take a nap.
3-year-old: I telling Daddy you not having dinner.
Me:
3-year-old:
Me: Good thing you don’t make the rules.
5-year-old [marching from the bathroom with one green flip flop and a bare foot]: I am the master of poo!
While Husband is clipping his toenails:
5-year-old: Daddy, are you clipping your toenails?
Husband: Yeah.
5-year-old: I bite my toenails.
Husband: Oh, really?
5-year-old: And then I swallow them.
Husband:
5-year-old:
Husband: Don’t tell Mama, okay?
Just after getting home:
9-year-old: Who’s going to check the upstairs for monsters?
Me [laughing out loud]: Jadon. You’re silly.
9-year-old: Did you just volunteer, Mama?
Me:
9-year-old:
Me: What kind of monsters?
9-year-old: I just dislocated my jaw, I think.
Me: Do you think it’s because you talk so much?
9-year-old:
Me:
9-year-old:
Me:
9-year-old: I don’t think so. I think it’s because I yawn too big.
Leaving late from a Christmas party:
6-year-old: It’s stuck! I can’t get it in!
Me [giggling, to husband]: That’s what she said.
6-year-old: I need help! I can’t do it!
Me [giggling harder]: That’s what she said.
6-year-old: Daddy, my seat belt won’t buckle! Help!
Me [giggling hysterically]: That’s what she said.
Husband: OK, you’re taking this too far. I think we had you out in public too long.
by Rachel Toalson | General Blog
Every year Husband and I sit down to make some goals for the New Year. And, of course, this year was no different, although six boys make it a little hard to have any stretch of uninterrupted time to write out goals and make them look remotely pretty. So if these don’t make a lick of sense, I’m sorry. We’re drowning here, and my life preserver has a hole in it.
1. Stop having homicidal thoughts toward my children.
I’m kidding. Or am I? No, really I am. I don’t ever have homicidal thoughts toward my children. Actually, if I’m being candidly honest, the thoughts that tend to come sometimes are, “I wonder if I could give these two away to that one family member and then just keep the rest.” And the “these two” part changes every day, because the easy ones change every day, too. That’s a lie. “These two” are almost always the twins in the terrible 3s. They’re the most consistent team in my house. But in the new year, I would like to make it my goal to not let any of those I’d-like-to-give-you-away thoughts come. This is a tall order, but the twins will turn 4, and I’ve heard 4 is a turning-around point for kids like them. At least that’s what I hold tight to when another twin catastrophe comes swinging in.
2. Make one meal where no one says, “I don’t like that” before they even taste it.
Maddening. Here I’ve slaved over a damn stove all afternoon, and I put that yummy chicken soup with the ingredients I threw together, because someone ate all the carrots and someone spilled the oregano and someone else was snacking on the chicken while I wasn’t looking, and, also, I’m not the best at planning meals, but still, it took an hour to cook, and before they even taste it, someone says, “Aw, I hate that.” Yeah, well, I hate you right now, too. I’m kidding. Or am I?
3. Never watch another episode of the following shows: Pokemon, Octonauts, SpongeBob SquarePants, (fill in your own blank).
I’ll say what we’re all thinking: Kids’ shows are the worst shows ever. Not only do they have theme songs that will get caught in our brains for a thousand years, but they usually feature a whole slew of children’s voices. I don’t know about you, but I have enough children’s voices in my house trying to get my attention. I don’t need another little-kid voice trying to explain what a vampire squid is, because I’ve got plenty little-kid voices pontificating about how they didn’t have milk today and so I have to get them some right this very minute and make it a double portion and informing me that their poop was green today and sharing everything they learned when playing Plants vs. Zombies for their 10 minutes of technology time. I feel like murdering my TV, that’s what I feel like. We don’t watch a whole lot of TV, but when we do, my God. I would like those characters to disappear forever.
(Kids shows that are an exception in my book: Fresh Beat Band and Yo Gabba Gabba. If anyone knows how to stream those shows, spill all your secrets. We don’t have cable, so I don’t get to watch my favorite kid shows anymore. I’m dying to know what’s happening with Marina and Shout.)
4. Make our home a Kidz Bop-free zone.
Oh, come on. You know what I’m talking about. That perfectly fine Taylor Swift song that’s sung by a little girl in a particularly nasally way, and instead of the lyrics, “Got a long list of ex-lovers, they’ll tell you I’m insane” the words are changed to something kid-friendly like “Got a list of old friends, they’ll tell you I’m to blame,” and even though it’s almost a little bit clever the way they changed it like that, there is something maddeningly annoying about a kid putting the song on repeat, and now all you hear is “Got a list of old friends, they’ll tell you I’m to blame” when the song plays forty million times on the radio (two months ago, at least). I almost bought my kid a Kidz Bop CD for Christmas, because they really do love them and have been checking them out from the library for months, but then I remembered the songs and the kids’ voices and how they can drive me up one wall and right back down the other.
Nope.
5. Put the kids to bed once and have them stay there.
I know, I know. They should be staying in their beds every night. They should stay put, because I’m the parent. I’m probably not putting my foot down quite forcefully enough. Well, I’ll tell you what. I’ll trade you for a day, let you take care of six boys for twenty-six whole hours and we’ll see if you feel like putting them back to bed three million times at the end of your day. Husband and I are done by the time bedtime rolls around. We’ve gotten really good at pretending not to hear footsteps and laughter and knocking. We lock the little ones in their room, where they can’t get out and terrorize the house or, worse, DIE (they ate a whole tube of toothpaste at 3 a.m. one morning while the rest of the house was sleeping. Husband happened to hear a thump and went to investigate. Twins and a squeezed-empty tube of peppermint delight, also smeared all around their mouths. The clues were hard to ignore.) And then we ignore the rest.
6. Put items in the recycling basket and not have them come climbing back out when the 9-year-old is on trash duty.
My 9-year-old is an environmentalist, and he likes to save things and re-imagine what in the world they could be used for. This is a great thing, except I’m not so keen on climbing into bed with a mascara container he thinks I could reuse if I “just think hard enough.”
7. Stop expecting my children to remember our nightly routine—even though it’s been done every night of their lives.
There are routines we have set firmly in place in our house. Some of them we’ve been doing for as long as the oldest has been alive—nine years. One would think this would be more than enough time to establish that as an every-single-day routine. And yet our kids act like it’s a surprise every night when story time rolls around and it’s time for them to sit quietly in their spots (they thought it was jump-on-the-couch-naked time, but that’s doesn’t even have a time slot on our schedule.). They act surprised that it’s time for lights out when 8:20 rolls around and they have no more time to silently read or write in their journals. They act surprised that they have to take a bath and brush their teeth and put on pajamas because we’re parents who care about good hygiene (mostly).
So, rather than expecting them to remember that this is a routine and we’ve done it every single night, I’m just going to start expecting that they will put up a fight and be pleasantly surprised when they don’t. Optimism and all that.
8. Leave the house once and not have to search for shoes or cups or jackets or kids.
It never fails. Every time we try to leave the house, someone is missing shoes. Or a jacket they remember hanging on their hook when they took it off (yeah, right) is not there. Or someone needs drink real quick. Or someone went missing. Our kids make us late more times than they make us on time, and in the new year, I would just like to leave once without searching for something important, just to prove we can.
9. Take the argument time from two hours to one.
We have one of those strong-willed kids (actually we have a few of them, but two are too young to be skilled at it, thank God). He also happens to be a sticky-brained child, which is, as you might imagine, quite an easy combination to parent. He doesn’t fight about everything, mind you. But he fights about at least one thing every day. He’s become quite skilled at picking his battles. The things that are really important to him—say, building with LEGOs when it’s not time to build with LEGOs because it’s time for him to get in the bath—he will push and push and push until we’re too tired even to breathe anymore. It doesn’t matter how many times you’ve told him that “the answer is no,” he will fight. I would like to lessen the amount of time we spend arguing every day. (It’s not really two hours right now. I’m kidding. Or am I?)
10. Go a whole week without hearing a blood-curdling scream.
I live with a pack of boys. Screaming is what they do, mostly because they prefer to live dangerously. They’ll jump from the tree house to the trampoline and scream when their leg gets caught wrong beneath them. They’ll try to jump from the trampoline to the rock-climbing wall on their play scape and scream when they bonk their head. They’ll slide down the stairs head-first at the same time and scream when somebody got going a little too fast and kicked him in the nose as if kicking a brother in the head would stop his trajectory down. All that to say, I’m not really sure how realistic this goal is, but I’d really like to try.
As you can see, I have big plans for 2016 in my parenting life. It’s a good thing these goals depend on really fickle, unreliable little humans, because otherwise, they’d be way too easy. Goals are supposed to challenge us, right?
Well, challenge accepted.
by Rachel Toalson | Messy Mondays
It used to be “I love you.” My boys used to say those words all the time, every time they saw me. They would come and kiss me and lay their head on me and wrap their arms around me and whisper the words in my ear, and I would melt every time. Or maybe that’s just how my mind remembers those early years of parenthood.
Whatever. All I know is lately that used-most-often phrase that used to melt me has been replaced by another that melts me in a completely different way: I’m hungry.
The other day we were leaving for the annual family Christmas party a whole 4.5 hours away, which was already ratcheting up the anxiety, because who in their right mind likes to be shut up with six boys in a car for 4.5 hours (one way!)
When Husband and I woke that morning, we decided, in an effort to preserve the relative cleanliness of our kitchen for when we returned late that evening, to grab something at the store for breakfast. Sure, we could have gotten up at 5 a.m. on a Saturday to leave on time for a Christmas party 4.5 hours away so we could have fed them breakfast in our kitchen, but we also wanted to arrive alive. And, honestly, we’d stayed up too late the night before catching up on Game of Thrones. So it was in the interest of all that we slept an extra hour and a half.
Still, we were feeling a little testy, which is usually the hangover of not-enough-sleep. So after we’d explained to the boys that we were going to pick something up for breakfast at the store and strapped them all in and turned on The Red Badge of Courage, because we’re a nerdy family that enjoys audio books, and the firstborn called from the backseat, “Okay, I’m ready to eat now,” when we weren’t even out of our neighborhood yet, we looked at each other and tried hard to tamp down the crazy. Sometimes crazy can’t be tamped, unfortunately.
“Oh,” Husband said. “Oh, you’re ready to eat right now. Well, I’ll see if I can stop at this tree and get something.”
The 9-year-old looked out the window. “But I thought we were going to eat.” And then, when he realized we were still in the middle of nowhere, because it had been 48 seconds since we left the driveway, his panic infused an extra “But I’m hungry!” just to make sure we knew.
As if we’ve ever NOT fed them. But this doesn’t matter to children, because they don’t know how to look back on all that has come before. They only know RIGHT NOW, not the other three thousand three hundred seventeen days they’ve been alive, when we fed them three (mostly) balanced meals a day and even (bonus!) two snacks.
All this talking was distracting me from the story. “Should I turn the story off?” I said.
“No,” the 9-year-old said. “It’s just that I’m hungry.” This caused a maddening chorus of “Me too” all around.
“I’ll see if I can pull over this H-E-B truck up ahead,” Husband said. “Maybe they’ll give us a sandwich.”
I shot a warning look at Husband. “There are no stores around right this second,” I said. “We’re not going to be able to stop until we get to a store. But don’t worry. We are going to feed you.”
“But I’m hungry!” the twins whined from just behind our seats. Clearly my words were not clear enough.
“We’ll feed you as soon as we can,” I said. “As soon as we can. Ass soon as we can.” That’s not a typo. Sometimes, when the crazy comes calling, I take it out on words so I don’t have to word-wound my kids.
Husband looked at me and shook his head, smiling. The boys were quiet until we got to the store. And then, of course, their daddy was taking too long. He was never going to come out. They were never going to eat again. They were going to die of starvation, before he got back out of the store. I told them to count the cars in the parking lot, but that took all of three minutes, because no one else was out this early on a Saturday.
Finally, finally, finally, Husband came out and saved the day. I guess they were too busy stuffing their faces with blueberry bagel to say thank you.
My boys are always hungry. There are six of them, and they aren’t even teenagers, but they can inhale two dozen eggs in a single morning and punctuate the inhale with an “I’m still hungry.” They can eat five pounds of chicken and not bat an eye. Two of them sneaking into the freezer while I’m otherwise occupied cleaning up the last mess somebody “askidentally” made can eat a 12-ounce bag of frozen broccoli—frozen—and still go looking for more. The most opened door in my home is the refrigerator one. They’re always looking for something else to pass the eating time.
Well, there’s nothing left, because the schools are STILL ON CHRISTMAS BREAK. They have eaten me out of house and home. I can actually see what color my pantry shelves are now, because they’re empty. The only good thing about it is I gave the refrigerator its first scrub-cleaning the other day, because it was the barest it’s ever been. There’s nothing left in our freezer. I have no idea what we’re going to have for dinner tonight. Looks like popcorn, some chia seeds and…a handful of old edamame the boys won’t touch once it reaches “leftover” status.
Thank God school starts back up tomorrow. Oh, also, hey, teenage years: Stay far away, please.
by Rachel Toalson | Stuff Crash Test Kids say
5-year-old: Well, I guess Asa has to stay home today.
3-year-old #1: Yeah, because he has a throat.
3-year-old #2: No, he throwed up.
3-year-old #1: Yeah, he throwed up because he ate the oatmeal Mama cooked.
5-year-old: Knock knock.
Me: Who’s there?
5-year-old: Weapon.
Me: Weapon who?
5-year-old: Weapon Nae Nae. [hysterical laugh] Get it? Weapon Nae Nae, not Whip It Nae Nae.
Me:
5-year-old:
Me: I like knock knock jokes when they make sense.
5-year-old: Knock knock.
Me: Nope.
6-year-old: Knock knock.
Me: Who’s there?
6-year-old: What does a pirate say on his 80th birthday?
Me: I don’t know.
6-year-old: Aye Matey.
Me: …
3-year-old twins [singing]: Police daddy dap.
Me: It’s actually Feliz Navidad.
3-year-old twins: Feliz nonny dad.
Me: It’s FELIZ NAVIDad
3-year-old twins: Police navi dad.
Me:
3-year-olds:
Me: So close.
6-year-old: Mama, guess whose light saber this is. Oh, never mind. Daddy, whose light saber is this?
Husband: Yoda.
6-year-old: Yes, first guess!
Me: Why didn’t you ask me?
6-year-old: Because you don’t like guessing games.
9-year-old: And you don’t know anything about Star Wars.
Husband: Mama knows about Star Wars. Ask her anything.
9-year-old: How did Qui-Gon Jinn die in episode one?
Me: He was probably killed by a light saber.
9-year-old: But who killed him?
Me:
9-year-old:
Me: I have no idea.
9-year-old: See.
by Rachel Toalson | Messy Mondays, Wing Chair Musings featured
I have to get something off my chest for a minute. And it’s kind of a big something. So I’m sorry for the rant. But we live in a messy WORLD, too, not just a messy world.
You know what would be nice? It would be nice to live in a world where men didn’t get pushed up on a pedestal for “helping” take care of their children. It would be nice to live in a world where men take care of their children and it’s not considered exceptionally exceptional.
I get it. We live in a world that is still finding its way into gender equality, that is still fighting for equal rights for women in the workplace, because, go figure, some women choose to have a career outside of babies and children and home. We are still figuring all this out. Traditionally, men were the breadwinners and women the caretakers, and that meant men didn’t do such things as “taking care of the kids.” So this is a new thing for us. But I feel like maybe we should be farther along than we are.
Husband and I are very happily married. But, during prime working hours—6 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.—we split our parenting duties as if we’re single parents. Weekends and evenings we hang out together as a family, of course, but on the week days it’s one parent on six. I take the morning shift, cooking breakfast, fixing lunches, making sure kids brush their teeth and dress in appropriate clothing and get their shoes, walking them all to school, walking the three who aren’t in school back home, keeping twins out of mud and toilets, entertaining the baby, reading them stories, putting them all down for naps. Husband takes over at 12:30, while they’re sleeping. He wrestles with them and sends them outside to play and invites their friends over to play so there are twelve or thirteen kids in the house (my anxiety just went through the roof) and makes them do their homework. He knows where all the kids’ school papers go and he signs all their reading logs and he marks their behavior folders and he makes sure their lunch stuff gets put in the sink and washed for tomorrow. He feeds the baby and changes diapers and makes sure they clean up their toys before dinner so the house is somewhat tidy by the time the day is through, and then he cooks dinner.
This is not exceptional. This is called being a parent.
People are shocked that we do it this way. “Must be nice to have a husband who helps like that,” they say.
Well, I wasn’t the only one who decided to have six kids. I was not the only participant, either. Damn right he’s gonna help so I can work, too.
See, what my husband understands (and I guess this is where he’d be exceptional—because it seems there aren’t many who understand it) is that I am a better mother because of my work. Not everyone is. That’s okay. I am. He gets that, and he’s happy to make sure I get to pursue a career.
But when he’s watching the kids so I can hole up in my room and write a handful of essays that may or may not change lives, it’s not babysitting. When I go out once a month with my book club friends to talk about a book for all of five minutes and then talk about our lives for another three hours, THAT’S NOT BABYSITTING. When he decides to bake some chicken in the oven or organize some out-of-control papers or take the baby for a few hours while I get a little extra sleep, he’s not just “helping.” He’s PARENTING.
Friends and babysitters and full-time nannies help. Dads parent.
I’m glad we could set that straight.
