by Rachel Toalson | Crash Test Parents
There is something every parent should know before they attempt this climbing-Mt-Everest-without-an-oxygen-pack-or-a-partner-or-warm-clothes task of tidying up a house: Children will follow along behind you and undo all your hard work.
There are a few times a year when I decide I’ve had enough of my filthy house. Most of these times are not weekends we’ve sent kids away with their grandparents and could actually tackle tidying and cleaning without kids underfoot, because who wants to spend a weekend without kids cleaning? Nope.
So most of the time, when I’m fed up with filthy, my kids are home, waiting to undo everything.
If both parents try to tackle the project, it’s much worse. One day Husband went upstairs to clean, while I was downstairs trying to clean, and no one was really paying attention to the 3-year-old twins, and they unraveled three rolls of toilet paper and tried to see how much of it they could stuff in the toilet with the plunger. I was in the kitchen, trying to scrub the counters that hadn’t been wiped down in too long by anyone other than an in-a-hurry-to-get-my-chore-done boy.
Once I turned on the vacuum cleaner, the boys saw it as their free pass to take out All the Stuff because Mama couldn’t hear them.
Every now and then—not often—I get a REALLY wild hair and decide I have to clean everything—under couches, under the stove, under the refrigerator, the tops of everything you can’t really see and usually leave to the dust. I’ll move all the furniture and find stockpiles of Hot Wheels and broken pencils and crayons and food they’re not even supposed to eat in the living room. The problem is, as soon as I pull any of it out, the boys take off with it. They’ll play with the cars, they’ll sharpen the pencils, they’ll eat month-old bread (I know. Gross). I don’t even have a chance to put it all in the trash before it’s already disappeared.
I guess, in reality, that saves me a step—putting it all away—but they really only end up displacing it somewhere else in the house, where it will most likely find its way back underneath the couch.
On these not-so-frequent, clean-everything days, I’ll tell them, “We’re cleaning the house today” but to them, these words have no meaning. That’s not true. They have meaning. It’s just a different translation.
Children don’t understand cleaning and tidying language.
“We’re cleaning the house today” means get out all the papers and scribble one little thing on them and call it finished, and then, when you’re tired of that, take out a few books to read and make sure you leave them on the floor, and then, when you’re tired of that, go outside and play for three seconds and bring in forty rocks for Mama—make sure you say they’re for Mama, because this is how you know they’ll definitely be kept, except this time Mama is being really mean, and she makes you take them back outside, and she’s the worst mother ever. Well, fine, you just won’t give her anything anymore, then. At least until you see those weeds in the yard with the purple flowers and pick them all so you can toss the bouquet at Mama, because she’s vacuuming, and it’s the perfect time to throw pretty things at her.
“No more toys out right now,” means, sure, Mama is cleaning, trying to pick up all the stray cars, and you’re not supposed to play with any toys right now, but there’s still the art cabinet, she didn’t say the art cabinet was off limits, so you go and take all the little cups with the crayons out, even though you only really need one, oh, and make sure you open the bottom cabinet and take out fifteen of the coloring books, even though it’s not even possible to color in that many at a time. Be sure to make the rest of them topple over so they fall completely out of the cabinet. Color for a few seconds, and then forget that’s what you wanted to do. Go upstairs to your room and find the hundred things you’re going to bring back down with you and then, when you’re bored with making that kind of mess, go into the pantry, because Mama’s not looking, and grab a mason jar of almonds and fill it with roly polies, after you eat all the almonds, of course, and then bring them back in and hide them in the pantry so Mama will never know you ate a half pound of almonds in one day.
“The bathroom is off-limits for the next thirty minutes” means Mama will be so focused on getting the urine—from toilet misses, not purposeful peeing on the floor—that you’ll be able to get into the games cabinet and take out Lord of the Rings Risk, with its billions of tiny little pieces, which you know she must hate, since she’s always telling Daddy they should get rid of it, and he’s always saying he can’t get rid of it, because when you’re older you’ll want to play it with him, and you think, of course, that it’s the best game ever, because A BILLION PIECES (!) you can spread all over the floor Mama just vacuumed. Make sure you dump them ALL out and, when you’ve put them all on the Middle Earth map, decide it’s probably time for a break, and leave the pieces where they are so your 3-year-old brothers can knock them all off and they’ll slide under the couches and make Mama mad—but you’re off the hook, because the twins did it.
“I’ll only be upstairs for a minute” means you now have the opportunity to follow along behind Mama as she picks up every single stray book on the library floor and shelves it, biding your time until she moves into your bedroom to make sure it’s clean, and then your little brothers’ bedroom to make sure they didn’t empty the closets again. Wait until she’s in her bedroom, because she always gets stuck in there, and then pull down all those titles in the Harry Potter series, because before you start to read one of them, you must, naturally, see them all. Leave them on the floor, because book carpets are the best.
“Everybody stay out of the dining room” means that while Mama’s wiping down the table and cleaning all the glass, it’s your job to sneak all those cups down from the cabinet and fill them with water and put three of the Lord of the Rings Risk pieces in them and then into the freezer to see what happens to figurines when they freeze. Mama will probably never notice. Grin to yourself, because you’ve just successfully thwarted all your parents’ efforts to clean and tidy the house.
This is an excerpt from The Life-Changing Madness of Tidying Up After Children, the second book in the Crash Test Parents series. To get access to some all-new, never-before-published humor essays in two hilarious Crash Test Parents guides, visit the Crash Test Parents Reader Library page.
(Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash)
by Rachel Toalson | Crash Test Parents
Husband and I recently received a communication from our son’s fourth-grade teacher. Recess, the email said, was temporarily suspended for some problems kids were having on the playground.
They have since rescinded their punishment of the kids and found an alternative to it, but the possibility of these no-recess days got me thinking about the expectations we hold for young children—especially boys—in our schools.
Because I’m a mom of six boys, I get to see many different personalities slide out in the course of boy play. And even while one will choose to build quietly with wooden planks for his free play time and another will reach for a book and another still will race out to the backyard shrieking like a banshee and thrusting his pirate sword into the belly of an imaginary enemy, there are some things that come pretty standard in boy play.
1. They run.
On our walk to school, my sons can’t simply walk. They can’t. They run the entire way. I always say this is why I wear workout clothes most days—I have to keep up with my sons somehow. This is only halfway true…the other half of the truth is that I didn’t get a shower today, and, also, it’s a thousand degrees in Texas; may as well sweat in actual workout clothes. It somehow makes it better.
My standard footwear is my cross training shoes, because there is absolutely no telling when I will have to break out into a sprint to save a boy from a mistimed run or a fall that happened when they were engaged in a race with themselves.
2. They shriek.
No matter what boys are doing, they’re loud. If they’re sweeping the kitchen floor, they’re singing “Thriller” at the top of their lungs. If they’re running through the backyard playing Infected (a variation on chase, as far as we can tell, where the person who’s “It” adds an army of people who are “It”), they’re shrieking at the top of their lungs.
Incidentally, when we asked what happened on the school playground, my fourth grader said, “I don’t really know. I think a couple of boys got into a fight, but I was playing Infected, so I was running for my life.”
3. They fight.
For fun, my boys play a fight game. They call it “Slap Fight From Noon ’Til Night.” Sometimes there are variations on this fight game. Sometimes they use a superhero cape to whip the legs out from under their opponent and end up with welts on their shins. Sometimes they take plastic swords out to the trampoline and whack each other with ill-aimed blows. Sometimes they just use their hands.
This is all for fun. It’s as delightful as it sounds.
4. They bounce.
Boys are bundles of energy, and if Husband and I are doling out instructions, saying something serious, or just mushily telling them we love them so so much, my sons are forever and always bouncing. They bounce on their bottoms, they bounce on their bellies, they bounce on their knees. They bounce so much it makes me sore watching them.
5. They very rarely think before doing.
The most frequent answer to “What were you thinking” after a kid has busted his face on the side of our brick house, at which he ran full speed ahead to test his stopping reflexes, is “I don’t know.” And it’s true. They don’t know.
When my sons do stupid things like try to jump from the trampoline to the top of their dad’s shed fourteen feet away, act on their insatiable curiosity about what it’s like to pee off the top of our van, or ride down the stairs on a skateboard, I already know the answer to my deepest wondering.
6. They compete.
Whatever boys are doing, it’s a fierce competition. They will simultaneously swing across the monkey bars to see who can finish first, knocking out teeth in the process. They will race to the end of the sidewalk to see who wins on the way to check the mail. They will eat their food—practically inhale it—so they can be the first one done and in line for seconds (there is no line. We don’t even dole out seconds until everyone has finished their firsts. Does it matter? Nope.).
7. They lose all sense of time and space.
When they’re little, boys don’t have much of a sense of their body, which is why they’ll barrel into their mother, nearly knocking her flat, when they decide they want to give her a hug. They also have no sense of time. “I’ll be done in two minutes,” they say, and what they really mean is twenty.
(This doesn’t change as they get older, unfortunately. Husband will often say, “I’m almost done,” and two hours later he’s finally ready for our date night at home. I’m already asleep.)
8. They’re gross.
They compare the boogers they picked from their noses, they collectively gather in the bathroom to see poop before it’s flushed, they like nothing more than to announce to the house and the entire world, “He’s bleeding!”
On a regular basis, my boys try to determine who has the smelliest farts. They will sulfurize each other out of a room before they declare a winner—and by then no one’s conscious to celebrate.
Girls have their challenges in a society like ours; I struggle with those challenges every day.
Boys have their challenges, too, and they can be seen, most often, in the early classrooms of their childhood. It’s unfortunate that all across the nation, boys are monthly, weekly, daily punished for who they are. Of course they must learn how to take control of their bodies and navigate a social world that needs softer voices and better attention—but never at the cost of their identity.
My boys drive me perpetually crazy, but I know that one day I’ll miss being jostled on my way to the bathroom, knocked sideways into a stream of crop-dust because they wanted to get there first.
Boys will be boys. And I love them for it.
This is an excerpt from Hills I’ll Probably Lie Down On, the fourth book in the Crash Test Parents series. To get access to some all-new, never-before-published humor essays in two hilarious Crash Test Parents guides, visit the Crash Test Parents Reader Library page.
(Photo by Helen Montoya Henrichs.)
by Rachel Toalson | Crash Test Parents, Happenings
I saw him at the table, spacing out.
“What are you doing?” I said.
“Thinking about your book cover,” he said.
“Oh yeah?” I said, trying not to show my excitement; I’ve been asking him to design this cover for a while now.
He slid his sketchbook toward me, and I saw the beginnings of a perfect cover.
This is the way it normally happens: I catch Husband in a trance, he sketches, he asks my opinion, which is always ill-informed, and he designs what he wants anyway (even though I rarely have anything at all to say about a cover except vague things like, “I’m not sure I like that color,” and when he asks me what color I’d like instead, I shrug. I’m the best client ever.).
I am fortunate enough to be married to a man who is skilled at many things, including book cover design. For the Crash Test Parents series, which is a collection of books filled with humor essays, he always starts with some kind of caricature of our family and tailors that to the content of the book.
These are like digital markers of how our family has grown up and changed.
This particular cover exemplifies beautifully some of the hills Husband and I have decided to lie down on: kids being rowdy, kids fighting one another, kids tattling, kids playing chase in the house. There are many mishaps parents can focus on in a day—and I’ve found that there are much more important things than these, as crazy as they may make me feel during any random hour.
So this cover, for me, feels perfect—because not only does it depict my entire family, all these people I love, in a scene that depicts their personality, but it also includes a white surrender flag.
It says, I surrender.
It says, It’s okay to surrender.
It says, I’m so glad I surrender.
In the forefront, Husband drew our twins, chasing each other through the house, likely because of some toy one wants and the other doesn’t want to hand over. What you can’t see is what will likely happen next: one of them will trip over something and the other will crash into something, and both will start wail-crying, blaming the other.
There’s also my third son, tattling, which he loves to do, and, to the left, my first and second son, boxing. Again, you don’t see what will likely happen which is this: the oldest will get his feelings hurt because he wasn’t actually trying to box, he was just pretending.
And hanging from my arm is my youngest, who can hang as long as he wants, because he’s the baby and it’s no secret that he’s spoiled.
Not the least of all these wonderful elements is the expression on Husband’s face and the one on my face. He looks apologetic; I look resigned—which is usually the case (he is, after all, the one who is responsible for all these boys).
A perfect book cover, if I ever saw one.
More info about the book
Hills I’ll Probably Lie Down On will release Aug. 14 from Batlee Press. This is the fourth full-length humor book in the Crash Test Parents series.
Blurb
Choose your battles.
It’s sage advice. But most parents, before becoming parents, don’t have a clue just how many battles kids will place in front of them with seemingly endless energy to engage. Choose your battles becomes a life-saving measure when one has kids. Knowing when to stand your ground and when to lie down is imperative in the face of such admirable yet aggravating persistence.
From the voice behind the popular Crash Test Parents blog comes a brand new collection of comical essays about the challenges and joys of parenting. With measured wit and eloquence, Rachel exposes the universal challenges of leaving the house with kids, traveling with kids, putting kids to bed, eating with kids, and, largely, daily life lived with kids.
About the author
Rachel Toalson is the author of Parenthood: Has Anyone Seen my Sanity?, The Life-Changing Madness of Tidying Up After Children, This Life With Boys, and a handful of poetry books. She lives with her husband and six rowdy boys in San Antonio, Texas.
Excerpt
For excerpts from Hills I’ll Probably Lie Down On, see one or all of the following:
Child Leashes Save Lives and Sanity
The Fastest Way to Go Insane: Try Working From Home With Your Kids Around
(Above photo by Dawid Zawiła on Unsplash)
by Rachel Toalson | Crash Test Parents
My family makes quite a spectacle when we go out in public. There are eight of us, but this isn’t what drops the jaws of those around us. What drops their jaws is the fact that seven of us are male.
If or when you see us on the streets of my city, you will likely see someone lagging far behind and someone else racing far ahead. Since our twins grew out of traveling in a stroller, this has become even more pronounced. Which means, for safety measures, we had to invest in some backpack leashes.
You probably already know about this interesting invention, but I’ll tell you my take anyway. The foundation of today’s backpack leashes is a cute little stuffed animal—we have a bear and a monkey missing two ears because my twins are nothing if not destructive. These leashes have a harness you can strap to your toddler’s body. The tail of whatever animal you’ve chosen has a leash you can hold so if your kid happens to run out into the parking lot like it’s a fun game to get smashed by the tires of a car, you can steer him back from his overzealous play.
Hypothetically.
At first I felt bad about using these leashes. Before I was a parent, I’d seen other parents using them and always thought them cruel and distasteful (the leashes, not the parents).
So many things change when you have children, including your attitude about putting kids on a leash.
The first time one of my twins was released from the confines of our car and darted straight for the road while we were wrestling another kid away from the packed lunch and I, in my eighth month of pregnancy with his little brother, raced to save him from an unsuspecting driver barreling toward him, I just about had a heart attack (not to mention what happened to my pants). I didn’t think I was going to make it. (That was nothing compared to the next day, though. I could hardly move, I was so sore.)
And I knew we had to do something about our toddlers’ freedom. I knew I wasn’t getting any faster, and they weren’t getting any fewer. There were two of them, after all. One could distract both parents (it takes two to handle one of them) while the other did God knows what.
Leashes it was.
The first time we used our backpack leashes was on a family trip to the San Antonio Zoo. The leashes saved our twins’ lives seventeen billion times—and that was before we even left the parking lot.
Say what you want to say about what that indicates—I’ll probably agree. They’re impulsive boys who don’t think about the consequences of their actions. They don’t hear us unless we raise our voices (and their hearing has always tested fine). They are the most difficult of our children to manage.
So we slap leashes on them.
Child leashes make other people uncomfortable. I get it; as I admitted above, I used to be uncomfortable with them, too. But after a certain point, don’t you trust a parent to do what’s best for their kids?
Seems lots of people actually don’t. When Husband and I are walking past the local zoo’s dining area, where our kids always loudly complain about how hungry they are, people make a point to catch our eye and then, while we’re looking, shake their heads at our cruelty (maybe it’s the kids complaining of hunger, not the leashes. We’ll never know. I don’t really care.). When we are speed-walking past the alligators (leashes only protect from so much), on our way to the petting zoo, people eye Husband and me like we’re the Worst Parents Ever (we are, according to our still-hungry kids). When we’re in the middle of a crowd because everyone’s trying to see the panther that just woke up, and someone, who wasn’t paying attention, runs right into the leash, that someone scowls at us.
Most of the time, I take it like a champ. People don’t know others’ reality until they live it.
Sometimes, though, I say things that are almost guaranteed to make those scowlers even more convinced of my awful parenting. Here are a few of those things.
1. “Oh, don’t mind me. I’m just taking my kids for a walk.”
I like to save this one for the dog owners we pass who actually leash their dogs. They look at me like I’m a disgusting excuse for a parent, but do I care? The answer to that question is no.
2. “Kids are like dogs—may as well leash them.”
I’m only speaking the truth. You throw a ball to a toddler, and he will happily retrieve it for you, maybe even with his tongue out. A toddler will pee wherever he wants to, as if he’s marking his territory. You chase a kid, and he will hightail it out of there, just like any spooked dog. And if you’ve ever been kissed by an eighteen-month-old with bad aim, you know it’s exactly like a face full of dog slobber (except much sweeter, in my opinion).
3. “You should see them when they’re not leashed.”
This is all in good fun, but seriously. You do not want to see our twins unleashed. It is physically impossible for them to stay in one place. The times we’ve been brave enough to let them walk without holding onto the bear’s or monkey’s tail, we always regret that small taste of freedom.
Also, unleashed, my twins would very likely do something ridiculously stupid. They have no concept of what is dangerous and what is not, and I wouldn’t put it past them to nip at the heels of the cars speeding by. Pardon me if I don’t want them flattened beneath the tires of someone (a) going way too fast, (b) playing with their cell phone, or (c) likely both.
4. “It’s a good thing they invented kid leashes, huh? Keeps them in one place for however long you want. I use them all the time in my backyard!”
I like to say this to make scowlers think that we actually use our kid-leashes for other times besides when we’re walking in the middle of a crowded, dangerous place. (We don’t.) You should see their faces.
5. “If you loved them, then you shoulda put a leash on them.”
This is usually sung facetiously to the tune of Beyonce’s hit song, “Single Ladies.” It’s great when you’re going for surprise that quickly turns into judgment. My favorite.
6. “Oh, okay. I’ll let out the slack a little. They like knowing they have a little freedom, right? But not too much. Can’t be too careful.”
I punctuate this with a crazy little cackle, because, well, I like them to look at me like I’m crazy. Because I kind of am. And it’s funny, because backpack leashes don’t actually have slack. They’re made so that a kid can only be a few feet away from you, which is where they’re safest.
We’ve slowly trained helped our twins to better accept the reality of their leashes, and they no longer pull against them. In fact, they take their captivity like champs. And every now and then, we’ll feel a bit hopeful and try the whole freedom thing again. We’ll tuck their leash-tails into the backpack part and point out the elusive panther as we pass. It takes them only moments to do exactly what we expect them to do: divide and conquer, except it’s not so much conquering as it is disappearing so completely that we’ll spend the next half hour trying to locate them, hoping they’re not the kid on the evening news who was mauled by a tiger.
Husband will enlist the help of several zoo employees while I stay put trying not to lose any more children. And just when we’re about to lose hope, our missing son will come careening toward us, running for his life, because there’s a zoo employee trying to pick him up, and he doesn’t talk to strangers.
The leashes will not come off for the rest of the day, and our son won’t even whine or yip about it.
Hypothetically.
Say what you want to say. I know those leashes save lives.
This is an excerpt from Hills I’ll Probably Lie Down On, the fourth book in the Crash Test Parents series. To get access to some all-new, never-before-published humor essays in two hilarious Crash Test Parents guides, visit the Crash Test Parents Reader Library page.
by Rachel Toalson | Crash Test Parents
Husband and I both own businesses and work from home. He runs a successful video marketing company and I run a writing business. This means we see a whole lot of each other, which is great. We get to each lunch together and hang out together, and we get to talk to each other about the crazy things our kids are doing today, and we get to tag-team on the child-raising so our sons get to spend as much time with their daddy as they do with me.
It’s not lost on me how fortunate we are to do this. I’m very grateful.
We have three sons in school right now. Someone else takes care of them all day, and I’m only responsible for the three who remain at home, which is responsibility enough, since two of them are Dennis-the-Menace-on-steroids twins.
I don’t usually work when I’m on duty with the kids, but lately I’ve been using about a half hour of my time with them in the mornings to catch up on some communication tasks and other things that have been falling through the cracks. And everyone knows that once you start making exceptions, the exceptions start to feel like a rule.
Kids, of course, have made it super easy to work from home. Everybody should try it. Especially if they like walking down the road toward insanity only to see it waving maniacally—already behind you.
Kids actually make it very difficult—if not impossible—to work from home.
For those who are considering this life change, here are some reasons why working from home is one of the most difficult career challenges I’ve ever faced:
1. Their definition of what is important information is terribly skewed.
They want to tell me that they had to go poop and that their poop was dark brown and stinky, but I’ve got an email to send, and then after I send it, I realize I’ve totally used the wrong word, substituted “close” for “clothes,” and there’s no way that magazine editor is even going to open the essay I sent along with my email, because I used to be an editor once, too, and mistakes like that aren’t tolerated from freelancers.
They want to tell me what colors they used to color Elmo in their coloring book; and they want to tell me that the hole in their jeans just got bigger, while they were watching—they didn’t even touch it (yeah, right); and they want to tell me that they would like me to put the baby in his high chair so he’s contained, because they really want to make some snowflakes with the shape blocks, and he’s crawling all over their masterpieces and messing them up.
I know all of this is important in the worlds of children, but seriously. I’m trying to work here, kids. Figure it out.
That’s just for my morning on-duty time. Then comes the afternoon off-duty-I’m-now-working time.
Husband and I have an arrangement—which our sons know about—where the kids will stay out with whomever is on kid duty and will not burst into our bedroom, which is the location of our home office, while the other parent is working. And sometimes our kids do well with this arrangement; sometimes not so much. It’s not unusual that they will come bursting into my room, while I’m on my working shift, to tell me that their friend has come over to play. Not life-threatening information.
Sometimes they will interrupt my work to say the grass is green, which is, arguably, something to celebrate in South Texas. Sometimes they slam in and out of the door—three or four times in fast succession—to say they had a donut right before recess today. They’ll burst in to tell me that they got to play this one computer game at school and they built up a section of blah blah blah.
Now, I do love that they want to tell me all this, because I enjoy talking to my kids as much as anybody else does. But I’m also a writer. And when it’s my time to write, I want to be able to write. What happens when they surprise me with a visit is that I will usually have to rewrite a thought, maybe even all the ones before it, because I require absolute concentration when I’m choosing words for a page. So a five-second interruption just cost me half an hour of writing.
2. They don’t stay put.
My twins are the best escapists around. I have some amazing stories to tell on their application for gifted and talented when they go to kindergarten. They have escaped so many prisons (not really prisons; you know what I mean) in astonishing ways.
For a while, we had a lock on our back fence, which ensured that they were contained in our backyard. And then we decided that they were getting older and maybe we could try something new and see if they actually stayed where they were supposed to stay (this is always a bad idea on the part of a parent), without the suggestion of a lock—and, also, it was really annoying having to unlock the back fence when the boys’ friends wanted to come follow them into the backyard and jump on the trampoline. We didn’t like those friends trampling through the house because they were so numerous.
So we took off the lock. And the first day it was off, the twins escaped into the front yard (I was watching). I brought them back to sit in their booster seats as a consequence and told them that if they were going to break the rules, they weren’t going to be allowed out back. We’d try again tomorrow.
We tried again tomorrow. And the next day and the next day and the next day, and every day, for two months, after that. They would not stay no matter that it meant they would be sitting in their booster seats until lunchtime and wouldn’t be able to go out and play (trust me, it was probably worse for Husband and me).
So the lock went back on.
We know it’s just a temporary fix, because they’re the kids who figured out they could pick their bedroom lock (put in place to keep them from wandering at night and killing themselves with vitamin overdoses or worse) with the prong of a box fan. I’m waiting for them to figure out how to pick the lock on the fence, which will require a more creative solution. At least they keep our creativity flowing.
3. They like to close laptops and press buttons.
My fifteen-month-old is really good at this, because I usually like to sit on the floor so he can see me and come hug me whenever he wants. So, yeah, I know this is my fault. An email I tried to send the other day had an extra “lk” at the bottom of it. I caught it. But proofreading has taken on a whole new dimension now that the kids make it so easy to work.
My twins will randomly walk up and close my laptop, usually when I’ve left it for just a second because I needed to take a bathroom break or I’m changing out a load of clothes from the dryer. And, as it usually happens, they’ll close it before I’ve saved anything, so I’ll have to start over. Or the computer won’t even start up because everything my twins touch turns to dust.
Fingerprint technology would be nice. It would at least delay the twins by a few months, before they figured out how to hack it.
4. You won’t hear anything from them for an hour, but as soon as you’re on a business call, their volume control malfunctions.
This happens more frequently to Husband than it does to me, mostly because I’m a recluse and hide away in my office so I don’t have to see anyone or go anywhere or talk on the phone at all. But poor Husband. Our kids will be perfectly content playing with the wooden structures, be building a track their cars can drive down, be quietly putting together a puzzle, and Husband will see the opportunity to return a quick business call that he didn’t have time to return during his shift. And as soon as he walks into the kitchen to talk, as soon as the person on the other end answers the call, the boys lose their minds.
It’s a lovely, mysterious phenomenon.
5. They need something.
It never fails. As soon as I set my timer for the half hour I’m going to work (because I don’t like to go over that time or it sets an unhealthy expectation for how much work can be accomplished, and before you know it your whole morning is gone), one of the kids will yell from the bathroom that he needs more toilet paper, or someone will say he’s hungry, or the baby will try to crawl up the stairs.
In spite of all this, I still manage to get quite a bit done for my business during that thirty-minute window—on average, I send one email with a few misspellings. It’s about all I can ask, and I’ve gotten used to it. So, kids, don’t worry about your interruptions.
We’re just subtracting it from your college savings. Which, judging by all the work I got done this morning, will be a negative balance by the time you get there.
This is an excerpt from Hills I’ll Probably Lie Down On, the fourth book in the Crash Test Parents series. To get access to some all-new, never-before-published humor essays in two hilarious Crash Test Parents guides, visit the Crash Test Parents Reader Library page.
(Photo by Lauren Mancke on Unsplash)
by Rachel Toalson | Crash Test Parents
Recently Husband and I went to visit my mom, and practically the whole time he and my sons were outside playing baseball. The boys had fun until the other team scored a run or they thought they should have another chance at batting but the game was actually over.
Truthfully, most of the games ended in tears (but they didn’t start that way).
After one such game, when I could hardly keep my eyes from rolling out of my head because of the broken hearts (they were exceedingly loud) from the losing team, Husband plopped down in the seat next to me and said, “I love playing with them.”
“Even when they whine and complain after the game’s over?” I said.
“Yeah,” he said.
And I was struck, right there on my mom’s front porch, which faces the open yard and, across the street, a cornfield, by how much children gain from the involved presence of their dads (not for the first time).
Dads offer something incredibly important to their children, and here are some of those things:
1. A confirmation of their identity
This is the most important thing Husband does for my sons. It’s the most important thing, in my opinion, that any dad can do for their kids. A dad can reinforce to their children the truth that they are important, they are beloved, and they are worthy of the love they are lavished.
I think here of my own background, where a dad did not stick around. What it spoke to me, the hole I carried around—and still carry around on my worst days—is that I was not worthy of his love.
Dads, with their continued involved presence, affirm who children are; they speak into their lives in an authoritative way, one that stands strong against the arrows those children will take when they are someday grown. Dads tell their children, through their involved and interested presence, that those children are worth being loved. And this means the world to a kid.
2. A role model
Dads model for boys who to be. Boys will try to walk like their dads and talk like their dads and sometimes even think like their dads. But dads also provide an essential model for their daughters, too. They show girls how to be loved. They show their daughters that they are not loved for their beauty but for who they are—and in a world like ours, this is an essential message to pass on.
Dads show boys how to treat girls, and they shows girls how to be treated by boys.
3. A voice of wisdom
Moms are wise and capable. Dads offer another dynamic of wisdom, a reinforcement, an underlining of that wisdom. A mom can exemplify to her children how to treat others, how to be kind and loving, how to live with courage and strength. But when that message is reinforced by dads, it grows spectacular wings.
I’m exceedingly grateful to the man in my life and all the hands-on fathers like him. Thank you for what you do.
(Photo by Helen Montoya Henrichs.)
