kids
After giving the dog a bath today (hashtag awwmaaaaannnn), Kieran announces that “I need a towel to give my bike a wash.”
“Sure!” I say, picturing this:
I give him a towel, figuring he’ll give his bike an imaginary wash, and that’ll be the adorable end of it. Instead, a minute later, I hear
I can’t even be mad about it, really. He told me what he was planning…
The night after Elana’s company holiday party, I took the kids to make Christmas presents.
Not a good plan.
Understand two things: 1. I was mildly hung over. 2. I therefore forgot to tell them we were giving this stuff away.
I am a rocket scientist
There was… hammering. My mild, eensy-weensy hangover perked up.
Aha! An opportunity to turn into a throbbing mind-melter
The kids were super well-behaved, all things considered. They listened well, weren’t particularly wild, and did a good job of staying with me in the crowded throng.
We didnt so much follow the directions on how to assemble the bird feeder. See point #1.
I was basically miserable. For which I feel like a total shit of a parent, because aren’t you supposed to rejoice in this stuff? Bonding time with the earnest fruit of your loins, a chance to laugh and have fun and make something really cool together: memories.
Mine will be of being grumpy and slightly woozy. At one point during the making of hot chocolate mugs, I had Vievey on my shoulders in order to help make space for the line that was accumulating behind us, and I felt all the blood rush away from my head and was pretty sure I was going to fall over.
I put her down.
I’m supposed to cherish these times, but this was just not my scene. The hangover was a significant part of it, but I also worry that it isn’t just the leftovers from a slightly inebriated evening. Going out to do crafty things with the kids rarely sounds good to me. I know they need stimulation and enrichment and above all parental attention, but I’m a homebody at heart. I crave my own private time, or at least a few minutes to knock out some writing. As I write this, I’ve bounced girls in my lap, wrangled a toilet paper dispute, and sworn that the next child to put their fingers in their hot chocolate will find themselves watching me pour it down the sink.
In the comfort of my own home, I can do these things. Out and about, it’s all-in, one hundred percent go-time with the kids just to keep them alive. Most trips aren’t quite so painful as this one, but I’m realizing that, for my own sanity, I’ve gotta take care of number one before the semi-clones. It’s like when the air masks deploy: you can’t save your kids if you can’t breathe, yourself. I spend a lot of time these days fight to breathe.
I’ve thought and written a lot lately about the nature of stories, and as I write this, I wonder if it isn’t time to ditch the “plane crash” narrative in my life. It’s really not that, after all. I love my kids and my life. Sometimes they’re overwhelming, but there’s no trading them for anything. I can tell a better story than a plane crash about my life.
Like how lucky I am to get to share the magic of Christmas with wide-eyes munchkins. If I’d have told myself that story befortwe left this morning, I wouldn’t have had three screaming kids reverberating through my hangover as I tried to explain that, no, they didn’t get tokeep this stuff they’d just hammered about 700 times into existence. They were gifts. For other people.
Reeeeeally should’ve brought that up sooner.
So here’s my gift to myself: a lesson that all I need is a new story. It just might make all the difference.
Kieran woke up at 6am today to go pee on the potty. While a distinctly better alternative to peeing in bed, this also meant that he was up for the day at 6am. I foolishly did not realize this until some minutes later, when he was squirming and squealing and banging his hands on the wall. Suffice it to say, a short while later - actually, far too much hissing, "Kieran, BE QUIET" later - we are all awake and downstairs.
I'm feeling kinda grumpy about this. Elana is off running a race, so I'm on single parent duty. I'm not even grumpy about that. I really just wanted to sleep in this morning until at least 7. I don't think that was too much to ask for.
That is why we are having a Bill Cosby moment this morning, and are having cake for breakfast. It's quieter right now than it's been since we were all asleep. The sound of silent gnoshing is sweeter than the leftover apple cake. The coffee will be ready soon, and all won't be well with the world, but it'll be as right as you can get at this hour.
What's that, kiddo? Out of cake? Here you go...
You have moments that you don't realize, during which you say to yourself, "at least it can't get any worse." This happens. You don't realize it.
Until you're wrong.
Kieran had been making the poopy stance way too often while cleaning up Legos this afternoon. First, it should be noted that he was more or less actually cleaning up Legos, at a rate of one piece per minute or so. By the time he'd be old enough to go to college, he'd have finished the task, which was about perfect as far as I was concerned. In good news, he was also singing the "clean up song" he learned at preschool, or at least the relevant lyrics: "clean up, clean up... clean up, clean up... clean up, clean up", etc.
So there's that.
Then he informs us that he needs to pee on the potty. Bully for him. This is pretty normal, but by now he's also been making that poopy stance, so a quick undies check confirms that he hasn't already done his business. Again, awesomesauce. He's been farting up a storm, so slightly mild awesomesauce, but still.
He leaves. He gets to the stairs. He lingers on the stairs. This is a thing that no parent loves, and every parent deals with. I decide to check in.
This is when he informs me that he doesn't need to pee on the potty anymore. There he stands, in his underwear, coated in his own urine and standing in a pool of it.
[sound of record scratching]
This boy is potty trained. What. The. Fuck? I inform him that there are times that I don't kill him purely out of inertia, and send him upstairs to do the rest of his business, while I get the Urine-B-Gon and go to town on the stairs, grumbling to myself.
This is when it happened. That moment. I didn't realize it at the time, but this was the "at least it can't get any worse" moment.
By now, astute readers, you are asking, "but where are your daughters, those beatific creatures who so regularly poop themselves?" That is because you are a genius, and I have the mental prowess of a lobotomized sea cucumber.
The girls have been "napping", a.k.a. sitting upstairs in their cribs and grumbling to one another. I head upstairs to check in on Kieran - he has this tendency of taking care of business and then taking care of his grandmother's entire makeup drawer - and discover that he is, in fact, taking a monster dump, the kind that looks like it hurts, and wants to talk about the sound it made when it plopped into the toilet. The girls are grumbling, and I head around the corner to make some promise about getting to them when oh. My. Gawd.
First, the smell coming out of the bathroom has nothing on this room. It smells like week-old gym socks filled with manure and set on fire. That's because Genevieve has managed to take off her diaper and is covered in something that looks like mustard gas pate and smells worse.
I admit, I scream a little. It probably sounds high-pitched and girly. I find some part of her that seems safe-ish to touch and spirit her past her defecating brother and straight into the bathtub, where I knock the big chunks off and then proceed to give her a bath on the spot. Out, towel dry, into our bedroom where there's a backup crib set up, diaper, into backup crib, get Zoe. Tub has drained, refill tub, off with diaper did you really, really think that wasn't going to end in tears? She, of course, is covered in more of the same, just compressed into the diaper area, so it's on there nice and firm.
I'm a little panicky at this point, and just start throwing toilet paper at her, hoping that some of it will stick. Which, obviously, it does.
Kieran, meanwhile, has grunted his way through it and I'm just shouting at him not to move, he's next. He rightly determines that daddy has lost his shit - maybe making out that it's because he found so much of other people's - and is maybe a half-step shy of axe murder. I see fight or flight in his eyes, but he correctly decides that flight would definitely lead to axe murder, and that's without us owning an axe. He freezes, and holds as still as a two-year-old can while I scrape the smears off of his sister with toilet paper, bathe her, drain the tub, and ready it for him.
I think I'm still a little breathless. They're presently all corralled in the spare crib, which is turning into a WWE-style brawl with the girls doing surprisingly well, but sometimes you just need to work through these things.
At least it can't get any worse.
https://vimeo.com/74285788 ... here's a video of my kids playing jump rope. Hee, hee!