by Rachel Toalson | Stuff Crash Test Kids say
5-year-old: Mama! I have something really important to tell you.
Me: Well, I’m working.
5-year-old: Just real quick.
Me: Ok.
5-year-old [singing]: Batman’s in the kitchen, Robin’s in the hall, Joker’s in the bathroom, peeing on the wall!”
Me:
5-year-old:
Me:
5-year-old: What? He’s a bad guy.
6-year-old: Dear God, thank you for the day and for my baby brother I love so much, and please help us stop tooting, because it really smells. Amen.
Me:
6-year-old:
Me: I second that.
[Kids losing their minds.]
Husband: Why can’t we just have fun at Family Time?
9-year-old: Because we talk too much.
Husband:
9-year-old:
Husband: I’m glad you’re so smart.
Me: Are you having another glass of wine?
Husband: Just a little more.
6-year-old: It looks like you’re turning drunk.
Me:
Husband:
6-year-old: What does drunk mean?
9-year-old: Mama, if there was a boy who lied all the time in an orphanage and there was me, who would you choose?
Me: Is this a trick question?
9-year-old: No.
Me: Well, of course I would choose you.
9-year-old: Ha.
[5 minutes later, singing the same song he’s been singing all afternoon.]
Me: Wait, can I change my answer?
Husband: Alright, tonight’s Advent activity is to tell Zadok why you love him.
6-year-old: I love Zadok, because he’s easy to take down.
Husband: That’s not exactly–
9-year-old: I love him because he’s a good punching bag.
Husband: Wait–
5-year-old: I love him because he’s so annoying.
Husband:
Me:
Husband:
Me: Well, we’ve come a long way since last year. At least there’s that.
by Rachel Toalson | General Blog
“The hardest part of being a Mother is when they become adults and cut your heart to pieces.”
“Wait until they’re teenagers. Then you’ll have something to complain about.”
“Oh, please. Mothering isn’t hard until they get to the teens.”
-I Have it Worst
Dear I Have it Worst: I know I’m not a parent of a young adult yet. I know I don’t have to figure out hormones and girlfriends and how to handle broken curfews. I know my little people are way easier to control than the big people they will one day be. But have you ever tried to wrestle a plunger that just went swimming in poo from four 3-year-old hands, and as soon as you finally peel those 20 fingers from the stick and turn around to put the (still-dripping) plunger somewhere they can’t reach it, one of those four hands dips into the brown water to finish the job it wanted to do in the first place? Have you ever tried to stop an 8-year-old from digging out the old pacifiers from the trash can because he thinks they can be recycled into something new? Have you ever tried to convince a 5-year-old that horizontal stripes don’t really match vertical stripes?
I know, I know. The answer is probably “I’ve done things much harder than that.” I’m just trying to get you to practice this little amazing communication secret called “empathy,” which means “to remember how it felt when your 3-year-old drew all over his brand new organic cotton sheets with a permanent marker you didn’t know he had and you wanted to murder him.” I bet you thought it was dang hard, too.
(This isn’t a competition. Stop making it one.)
“A mother simply propagates a virus upon the earth. They all need to be destroyed.”
—Violently Yours
Dear Violently Yours: Let’s just use a little logic here. “A mother simply propagates a virus.” For anything to propagate a virus upon the earth, that means it must have been a virus, too. I’ve been called a lot of things, but this one is new. A virus? That sounds intriguing. Like a mum flu or a mothebola virus. I sure wish that’s what I were, because there are a lot of women in my life who would really like to have a baby. If I could infect them, you bet I would.
I know you meant your comment to be something far worse but I feel like I have to thank you for the compliment. I’ll remind you that a virus is so small it can only be seen with a microscope. Now. I’ve had six kids, including twins. There is no part of my body small enough to only be detected by a microscope. Maybe my brain. I can’t seem to remember anything anymore. So I appreciate the vote of confidence in my ability to shrink back to regular (or nearly nonexistent) size after six children, but I assure you, we’re not anywhere close.
Try again.
“I’ve met some really shitty mothers.”
-What’s Your Point
Dear What’s Your Point: Welp, I’m not one of them. I actually rock at being a mother. The only thing I have in common with your comment is what I do most mornings at about 9 a.m., give or take a few.
“Sounds like whining to me and she has a husband to boot. I am a single mom and I don’t feel this way. Thank God. There are some days when I want my son to leave me alone for 5 min but it’s not hard. Suck it up butter cup!”
“SHUT THE HELL UP! You are a mother now grow up. She seems like a spoiled little brat who wants her single life with kids back again. Can’t go back so look forward and be positive!”
-Parenting is Super Easy
Dear Parenting is Super Easy: I like this world you live in. How did you get there? May I please come, too? Because I live in a world where parenting is stinking hard, and it’s not because I’m not a good mom or because I never should have had kids or because I want my single life back. It’s just that I now live in a world where one of my kids will bust into my room in the middle of the night to tell me he feels like he needs to puke two seconds before he actually does, all over my comfy comforter that requires a bath in the tub and a stint out on the back porch to get clean. Now I have six boys who like to climb the walls like Spider-Man and put gigantic spitballs on the ceiling and leave LEGOs all over the floor so the baby is constantly in danger of choking on one of them. That doesn’t mean I’d trade my life today for my no-kids one. IT JUST MEANS THAT IT’S HARD. It just means it’s not perfect. It just means there are days I feel like tapping out, for just a second or a minute or a whole afternoon.
Scratch that. I’m totally lying. The real reason it feels hard is because all I really want to do is lie on the couch and read the latest George R.R. Martin novel and sip on a little red wine so it dulls my senses and I don’t have to hear the kids losing their minds about wanting dinner and why don’t they ever have food and who’s going to pour them milk. Why do kids have to be so dang hard?
“Are they all yours? My God.”
-Tactless
Dear Tactless: What’s a number you’d be comfortable with? One? Two? Maybe three? Well, then, that’s how many are mine. The rest are strays who just thought we looked like better parents than the ones they had. And hey. What’s a few more when you already have three?
What? They all look like me? Huh. That’s weird. I guess I get around.
“You have enough for a basketball team. With a sub!”
-Sports Analogies Are the Best
Dear Sports Analogies Are the Best: You smart thing. How did you guess? That’s exactly what we were trying to do. We got married and, 18 months later, looked at each other and said, “WE SHOULD START A TOALSON BASKETBALL TEAM, because that would be really cool!” And now here we are. It’s a really good thing we went for that sub, because a few of them can’t dribble a ball without breaking their nose. I think we probably need a couple more, just to be safe.
“Are you done yet?”
-Just Call Me Nosy
Dear Just Call Me Nosy: Nope. We’re not done until we beat the Duggars and get our own television show. Because that’s the whole point of having babies, isn’t it? Breaking the record for how many babies a body can produce in 25 years and snagging your own sitcom? I still have 10 or 15 good years of childbearing left, and you better believe we are going to use them.
“You were trying for a girl, weren’t you.”
-Big Mouth
Dear Big Mouth: No. I’ve wanted six boys since I was a little girl, and that’s exactly what happened. Lucky me.
Also, what’s wrong with boys? What’s wrong with wanting more boys?
“Stop using your choice to have six kids as an excuse to do nothing else.”
-Supermom
Dear Supermom: Gosh, I admire you. I’m sure you have a perfectly manicured yard and your homemade bread never caves in the middle and all your kids’ shoes match and are on the right feet every morning. And your kids probably never turn in a school paper late. And you never yell when the 3-year-old sneaks out of bed and hoards all the toothbrushes in the blue cup for God knows what reason, even though he’s been told and told and told not to wander and especially not to hoard toothbrushes because you’re tired of buying toothbrushes. And you throw the most spectacular birthday parties on the block. I wish I could be you. I really do.
But, alas, the only thing I do all day is lie on the couch and watch my hoodlums tear up my house around me so I have a reason to blame them for everything. I can’t clean house, because I have six kids. I can’t cook dinner, because I have six kids. I’ve been wearing the same workout pants for four days, because I have six kids.
The gulf between you and me is light years apart, so I give. You keep being your awesome super mom self, and I’ll keep being my despicable lazy mom self.
Thanks for commenting! If you have any personal issue with any of my answers, please email idontcare@babymakingfactory.com. And I’m sure I’ll see you around again soon!
by Rachel Toalson | Messy Mondays
Last night I dressed my 10-month-old in Star Wars pajamas and set him in a little kid chair, and I snapped a picture of him, because he was so happy and it was so stinking cute. And then I posted the picture on my social media sites today, because, like I said, it was cute, and everybody loves cute photos of babies,and sometimes all we need to feel like we’re on top of a Monday is to see the smiling face of a happy baby. But all was not as it should have been.
I did not check the picture for surprise appendages. Maybe it’s because I’ve gotten so used to ignoring the naked parts that go flying around my house. I live with a tribe of boys, after all, who would, hands down, prefer no clothes to clothes any hour of any day. After so much of all that nakedness, you just become immune to it.
Another boy mom noticed and sent me a message saying I had an unintended addition in the corner of the picture. So I took it down, cropped it and put it back up. Because it really was a great picture.
(This is the cropped version. See? Doesn’t that just make you want to smile?)
It probably goes without saying that I cannot “just snap” a picture in my home, because there is always a little boy running straight out of the bathroom without the pants he had on two seconds ago. I can’t “just take” a quick video of my boys dancing to “Whip It Nae Nae,” because one of them will get too hot and strip down to nothing but his birthday suit. I can’t just open the door to see who rang the bell, because it’s guaranteed that someone will peek around the corner, even though I told him to stay in his seat, showing more parts than he should.
Lately we’ve been the hub of the neighborhood. Kids just like to come to our house, because we’re super cool parents. Actually, it’s more likely because we have a trampoline in our backyard and a swing set and we let the kids be unless someone is dying. But this becoming a hub also means that at all hours of the day we have kids knocking on our door, asking to play.
On Saturday, I opened the door to find a little curly-haired girl. “I came over to play,” she said, walking right in before I could stop her. Problem is, we’d just gotten up, and when boys have just gotten up, there’s no guarantee that they are dressed in anything at all, because there is some sort of clothes bandit that keeps stealing into our house and stealing out of it with the pajamas they were wearing when we kissed them goodnight. I couldn’t be sure what exactly the situation was as I peered from the living room into the kitchen, because they were all wrapped in their blankets, since it was a cold morning. But then the 9-year-old stood up to go to the bathroom, dropping the wrapped-around-him blanket, and all he had on was fluorescent green boxers. At least he had something on, I guess.
But that little girl saw more than she probably should have. (Well. You probably shouldn’t ring our doorbell at 7 a.m. on a Saturday. So. Lesson learned. Hopefully.)
Will I ever get to a place where I can “just snap” a picture or “just take a quick video” and “just answer the door?” I don’t know. I do know that I have had to put some rules in place that I never, ever thought I would have to put in place back before I became a boy mom.
They sound a little like this:
Anyone who doesn’t at least have underwear at the table doesn’t get any food.
No, you may not got outside in your underwear (even in the fenced backyard).
Do not dance naked through the living room.
Because, you know, sometimes people knock on the door, and they don’t want to see your pride and joy. And sometimes people are out mowing their lawn while you’re jumping on the trampoline in your Captain America butt huggers, and they don’t want to see an accidental slip. And sometimes we forget to close the blinds, and people don’t want to see a streaker when they’ve only just woken up.
And, more importantly, sometimes Mama just wants to take a picture. For the love, go put on some underpants.
by Rachel Toalson | Stuff Crash Test Kids say
6-year-old: Sometimes I can’t get my poop out of my…uhhhh….
5-year-old: Booty crack?
6-year-old: No, my uhhhh….
Me: Colon?
6-year-old: No. My…uhhh…oh! My sphincter!
3-year-old: Daddy, you have a penis.
Husband: Yeah.
3-year-old: I have a penis.
Husband: Yes.
3-year-old: My brothers have a penis.
Husband: Yes they do.
3-year-old: Mama doesn’t have a penis. She has a booty.
Husband:
3-year-old:
Husband: Yes. Exactly.
3-year-old: I have a booty, too.
Husband:
3-year-old:
Husband: Well, I guess not exactly.
6-year-old: I came out of your belly first.
5-year-old: And then I came next.
9-year-old: Actually, I came first.
Me: You didn’t actually come out of my belly. The correct term is uterus.
6-year-old: So we came out your uterus?
Me: Well, no, you came out of my vaginal passage.
6-year-old: Where is your vaginal passage?
Me: It’s attached to my vagina.
6-year-old: Wait. You have a China?
Me:
6-year-old:
Me: Maybe we should wait until you’re older.
6-year-old: Yeah. I agree.
6-year-old: I held a worm today. And I ate a gummy worm.
Me: Would you ever eat a real worm?
6-year-old: No way.
9-year-old: Not unless someone paid me 5,000 dollars.
Me: Would you do it for 5 dollars?
9-year-old: No. I would at least need to be able to buy some new Pokemon cards. So 6 dollars.
Me:
9-year-old:
Me: Nope.
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. 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 sweaty armpits 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 who 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 overstimulation 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 you did on the playground today.” 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
It’s not just that this bathroom smells like a swamp. It’s also that there is always mud in the sink, from boys playing out back in the pit I told them to “not get in or else,” and, of course, they thought they’d try their hand at the “or else,” because mud and boys and fun, and then coming in to wash their hands (if they bother at all). It’s also that there are soggy toilet paper rolls in the trash can, because one of the 3-year-olds decided it would be funny to put one in the sink and turn on the water and watch it “turn curly.” (At least this is what we hope he did. Nothing has been confirmed, because when you ask a 3-year-old “What happened?” you’re likely to hear all about a roly poly out in the backyard that they put into the cracks between the porch rails and how they fell on their booty but it didn’t hurt and then they ate some popcorn that you know you didn’t make today but they probably found tucked into the couch from the last movie night three weeks ago. But, all things considered, I’d rather assume it’s not potty water that soaked the toilet paper roll and the floor and mostly his white monster shirt that he refused to take off because “I LOVE THIS MONSTER AND HE NEEDS ME TO WEAR HIM AND HE’S MY FRIEND AND I DON’T CARE IF MY SHIRT IS WET.” I didn’t feel like arguing for 36 hours, so I let it be.)
It’s also that there are these gigantic spit balls leering at me from the ceiling every time I dare to think I might use this bathroom instead of making the long trip upstairs to my no-boys-allowed one.
This bathroom is the guest bathroom. I am always, ALWAYS embarrassed when someone’s over and they say, “I’ll be right back” and I see them heading for it. I always want to give a disclaimer or some kind of warning that will encompass everything that has happened in this bathroom. It doesn’t matter how many times Husband cleans it (because I have a sensitive gag reflex). It doesn’t matter how recently that cleaning happened. It doesn’t matter if none of the boys have even used it since that cleaning. They have left their marks everywhere. Most notably, now, the ceiling.
We’re not really sure which one did this little prank. We’re only sure that it’s been there for three weeks now, because Husband and I are just.too.tired to try to scrape giant spit balls off the ceiling.
I’m sure it was so much fun. I imagine one of them closing and locking themselves into this bathroom under the guise of needing to “go number two,” because they knew it would buy them some time. And it probably wasn’t even premeditated. They were probably washing their hands and looked over at the perfectly fine toilet paper roll hanging beside the toilet and then the other used-to-be-perfectly-fine-but-is-now-soggy toilet paper roll dripping in the trash can and then, innocently enough, looked up at the ceiling. Then back at the soggy roll and back at the ceiling and back again. It was such a perfectly white, untouched space. I imagine he tore off a small piece of that soggy toilet paper and tossed it up with all the force his little 5-year-old body could muster, just to see if it would stick. And it did. And then he realized it worked, and this would be a REALLY fun game, and he waved his older brothers in and they all started playing this fun game called “How Big a Spitball Can We Make Stick to the Ceiling.”
And before we even knew what was happening, we had a ceiling full of gigantic spit balls.
I remember the lure of this game when I was a kid. My brother would put bigger and bigger wads of wet paper into a straw and launch it toward the ceiling. Boys at school would do it while the teacher’s back was turned, and the boys with the biggest wads that stuck AND went unnoticed by the teacher got the most points. I never did understand its entertainment. It just made me shudder a little, walking under all that spit. Maybe that was the point.
My brother and the boys at school never got such an impressive wad of toilet paper to stick to a ceiling, which has me looking for the biggest spit ball record in the Guinness Book of World Records. I’m pretty sure my kids are close.
