Tattoos and Drool

Most difficult, underpaid, underappreciated

This parenting thing. It’s hard. Like, really hard.

You have this tiny little baby. All it does is poop and eat and sleep and it likes to wake up a lot at night and cry for no reason and keep you from taking a shower, like, ever. And you think, man, this is hard.

Then they get a little bigger. And there’s teething, and becoming mobile, and figuring out how to feed the thing and the begging and pleading to sleep through the night just once. Just please go to sleep. And sometimes you think, I can’t wait until this kid is older. This is hard.

But the potty training. Ditching the crib. Terrible twos. Tantrums. Back-talking. Injuries. Wait a second. When does this start getting easier?

It doesn’t. Four years in and it hasn’t gotten easier. Different, more challenging predicaments await each new year. And from what I’ve heard, it just keeps getting harder and harder (as the parents of teens like to smugly remind me every chance they get).

I feel intimidated a lot of the time. Inadequate. Not worthy of being in charge of another human being (or 3!) and making sure they learn to choose the right paths.

Most recently, we’ve been learning that the way we parent (or don’t parent) has a huge, giant, I’m talking ENORMOUS impact on our 4-year-old’s mental and emotional well-being. Simple things, like absentmindedly rattling off one too many “just a minute, son”s and out of nowhere you’ve got a kid crapping on the floor for attention. Yes, again. Still. Whatever.

But really, this isn’t going to be another poop post. Just an example, albeit kind of a disjointed one, of how this. Is. HARD. When we first brought home that teeny little bundle, sat in our living room and asked each other, So what do we do with it now? we weren’t thinking about how four, five, six years down the road we’d have to worry about something much more complex than the color of his poop or how many jars of baby food he should be eating per day.

It seems like it should be a given – pop out a kid, hope to all the deities than you don’t mess it up too horribly. And maybe I was just incredibly naive back then. But tonight was my first real, true HOLY SHIT, WHAT IF I SCREW HIM UP FOR LIFE? moment.

It’s scary.

Because he’s a really cool, intelligent, loving kid. And god, I really hope I don’t screw him up. If I can accomplish that, then I’ve succeeded in life.

Screw you, Ashton

I would like to say right now that if I’m being punked, you can all STOP IT. Stop it right now. Because I totally won’t give you the comedy you’re looking for, I’ll probably just throw myself on the floor sobbing and screaming KILL MEEEE and you’ll all start backing up slowly towards the nearest exit. And then you’ll just have to pack your cameras up and trash all the footage and find another victim because it will be that sad and pathetic. I also might punch Ashton in donkey omelets and then you’d want to sue me but I’m really not worth anything. So yeah. NOT WORTH YOUR TIME.

And if that’s the case, don’t you have enough footage by now? I mean really. It’s only a half-hour show.

Telling the cats to piss in the rice box I made for the boys? Really not all that hilarious, sorry to say. Especially since I didn’t realize that’s what had taken place until I was absentmindedly running my hands through the box, discovered it was damp, and SMELLED MY FREAKIN’ HAND. Yeah, that was really awesome, as was the struggle to hold down the vomit as I furiously scrubbed the skin off my fingers. I can’t remember if this was before or after I had a kid poop his pants while the other kid was flipping a full-size mattress on its side in order to use the box spring as a trampoline.

The kid’s reoccurring ear infection? Not quite sure how you pulled that one off. Pretty brill. And excellent timing – you know, making him sick on a Saturday, plus a 5-day course of antibiotics, equals getting sick again shortly after they run out. Which is, OH, another Saturday. Fantastic. Now we get to do ear drops. Twice a day, for ten days. Which is totally my favorite activity ever, what with the bucking and the kicking and the screaming at an ungodly volume. I can’t wait to repeat that highly enjoyable task TWENTY TIMES.

And the four-year-old. Can’t leave him out, right? It was awesome being confronted by his teacher yesterday after class to learn that he had yelled maniacally and thrown a pair of scissors at her head. That’s not at all humiliating. And over what? Ah. Not wanting to do the art project. Completely valid reason for a violent tantrum.

The same day that happened, he also came up to me and was all “Mom, look at my hair!” and I was like what could you possibly have put in it now and he goes “It’s water!” and I’m all please don’t tell me from where and he says “It’s from the toilet!” And I was like, hell no, I did not have a child ripped from my vagina just so he could go and dunk his head in turd water. Do-over, please.

But the cruelest part of all? Dealing with the pee rice and the ear goop and the scissor-throwing while also having a baby who DOES NOT SLEEP. I am not lying when I say I would rather have hot needles stabbed under my fingernails than deal with an infant who is fighting sleep to the death and winning. ‘Cause see, too much of that leads to tweeting things like this:

So in closing. I’ll take these kids back and these ones too and also this perfect baby please. Now get out of my house.

Sometimes you forget they’re people

“I’m hungry. I’m thirsty. I wanna watch Dragon Tales. I’m hungry. I wanna go to the park. But Mooooom! HE! No HE!! I’m hungry. I, I, I, I I I I…”

That there? The sounds of my house. Day in and day out I hear the same couple dozen words in various combinations. Almost every sentence contains the word “hungry” or “HE!” So my routine is generally: Feed kids. Water kids. Pull Kid 1 off of Kid 2. Rock Kid 3. Put Kid 2 in Time Out for kicking Kid 1 in the face repeatedly. Feed kids. Tell kids they’ve had enough to eat before 9am. Console Kid 2 and put ice on his bite wound. Feed kids. Wrangle kids for diaper changes. More time outs. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Sometimes though, if I take a few seconds to listen just a little more closely, I’ll hear something different.

I was sitting on the couch nursing the baby, and out of the corner of my eye I could see Beckett, the two-year-old, wielding two hard plastic dinosaurs. He positioned one in a drawer from the play kitchen, and crawled the other up the first one’s back as he chanted, “Sube! Sube! Sube!” He then narrated an entire conversation, something to do with, “Get in mah mouf! No, you CAN’T! Oh no, I falling!” as one dinosaur slammed into the other in a fierce battle.

He continued the dino demolition as I stifled my laughter and remembered back a couple weeks ago, when we were on vacation and I was able to overhear a conversation between the two boys as I laid in bed. There was a bathroom right next to the room I was sleeping in, and Sawyer had come down to use it and Beckett had followed.

“Hey Sawyer!”

“Hi, Beckett. I’m going potty.”

“Okay Sawyer, that’s foiiiine.” (Apparently I gave birth to an Aussie?)

“Sawyer, are you having good time at Grandma’s house?” (very slow and enunciated, as typical for the two-year-old)

“Yes, Beckett. Now, I have to go potty.”

“Okay, that’s foiiiine.”

“Beckett, there is poop on my butt.”

“Oh YEAH, Sawyer, there is poop on your butt!”

“Haha. NICE.”

Yes, sometimes if you listen, you’re reminded that they’re not just mindless food receptacles. They’re people, and they like to talk about poop just as much as the rest of us.

Just one reason they should come with a handbook

Warning: this post contains poop. Lots and lots and LOTS of poop. I say poop several times. Pretty much every other word is going to be poop. So if poop offends you, turn away now. Poop.

———

The are times when, as a parent, I feel I’m doing a pretty okay job. My kids are all clean, well-dressed, somewhat well-behaved in public, they don’t hit me or call me names, and they aren’t that weird kid in the grocery store with the filthy face that tries to poke your newborn in the face and keeps staring at you with big beady eyes. (You all know what I’m talking about.) They can count, write letters and tell knock knock jokes. And, look! I even managed to get my kid enrolled in preschool, and got him there on time on his first day.

Aren’t they cute? Innocent? Unassuming?

I’m doing a decent job, right?

Or so I think, until Thing 1 decides to completely destroy any confidence I had in my parenting skills by, get this – taking a giant dump in a toy box. For reasons I can only assume are to get back at me or his father for what he feels is some sort of injustice to his 4-year-old rights.

Picture the scene with me for a second. Starting a month or two ago, we began randomly finding small toy bins filled with pee in the playroom. Abso-fricking-lutely disgusting. BUT, never once did I assume it was one of the kids. I placed the blame on the cats, moved them up one more rung on the ladder of I Will Murder You With My Bare Hands So Help Me God (along with many other acts of cat disobedience, including putting holes in the leather recliner and chewing up a knitting project OMGDEAD) and went about my business.

This happened two or three times, and then just stopped. The buckets o’ urine hadn’t even crossed my mind in weeks, until six days ago, when this tweet spewed forth from my fingertips with much more fury than I was able to convey:

Oh, how I’d love for that statement to be a misprint. But it’s true. Horrifyingly, disgustingly true. I had been on the couch trying to shush and sway the baby to sleep, and Sawyer kept kicking my foot rest and chattering loudly (because kids only have one volume and that volume is VERY FREAKING LOUD) and every time he did, her eyes would pop open and I’d have to start the swaying shushing process all over again. MADDENING. So, I made what I did not thing was an unreasonable request: go upstairs and play with your cars until I get your sister to sleep.

You’d have thought I had asked him to position his head behind the back tire of Uncle Rico’s van so I could test his skull’s durability, because he WAS. NOT. HAPPY. with my request. He stomped upstairs angrily and slammed his door. (Lord help me when I have a teenage girl, if this is how 4-year-old boys are.)

I got the baby to sleep in less than five minutes once I had some peace and quiet, and when I went upstairs to put her in her bed, Sawyer came creeping out of his room all guilty like and told me he’d pooped in his underwear. SIGH. He handed me a pair of Big Dogs boxers and there was just a smidge of a skid mark inside. I figured he’d been the victim of a.. well.. ya know. Shart. Hey, it happens to the best of us. (Doesn’t it? Lie to me.) So anyway, I sent him downstairs to the bathroom while I went into his room to find a clean pair of underwear.

And that is when I found it. Well, technically, first I smelled it. Then I saw it. And I really didn’t want to believe I had seen it, but there it was. Plopped strategically in the center of a small rectangular plastic bin was a giant fresh pile of dook. And obviously of the human variety, not feline. With some pee trickling around it like a moat circling a castle for good measure. OH. MY. GAWD.

I marched the defiled toy receptacle downstairs to my son who was still perched on the toilet (although I’m unsure WHY because he was obviously empty) and had to fight the urge to dump it on his head, or holler maniacally, or rub his nose in it like a naughty puppy. My teeth were clenched together so tightly I thought they might shatter, and I might suddenly be choking on a mouth full of tooth dust, and I kept picturing my mom and the way she’d get up in our face and talk to us through gritted teeth and pursed lips when we’d acted like assholes. And I always hated it when she did that but now I get it, I TOTALLY get it, because I now know that clenching your teeth into an enamel vice grip like that is the only way you can contain the infernal rage that wants to explode from your lips.

In short, I was stumped. Completely and totally clueless on how to handle the situation. No one warns you about this sort of behavior. Or hell, maybe no one else’s kid is as poop-obsessed as mine so no one would even know to warn me about this. Seriously, this child is obsessed with poop. I remember back when he was six months old, and our very first poop incident involved him chomping into some when he was sans diaper after a bath. I can still see his four little turd-caked teeth grinning back at me as I was frozen in horror. (Yes, it was as gross as it sounds.) And later, when we began to attempt potty-training, it wasn’t unusual for me to go to retrieve him from a nap and find him naked and painting a poop Picasso all over his walls. POOP. OBSESSED.

So even though I’m quite the veteran when it comes to excrement escapades, I still didn’t have the slightest idea how to go about this one. All I could think to say was “WHY?? Why would you do that?” And of course he said he didn’t know, which even further infuriated me. So time outs were doled out and threats of no school were made and lots of “You are a BIG BOY, you poop in the TOILET”s were thrown in for good measure. What else is there to do, really? Many have suggested I make him clean it up, but 1) That just makes a bigger mess for me and 2) I really don’t think it would phase him. He’d think it was fun, because poop isn’t gross to him.

I was hanging on to the hope that the no school threat would cure him of this behavior, because he was extremely excited about school and his face crumpled into a silent sob when I told him he couldn’t go if he did it again. Sah-weet, that was easy! I am a parenting genius. Or, you know, NOT. Because he did it again a few nights later, after getting angry with us for *gasp* making him go to bed at the normal time. The husband and I had just given the baby a bath, and I went in to check on Sawyer because his light was still on. The foul smell hit me as soon as I walked through the door and there it was, in the same spot in his closet. This time I said nothing, just handed the poop box to Shelby and motioned as if to say, “Your turn. Good luck with that.” He broke out his bag of tricks behind the closed bedroom door while I got the baby to sleep, and when I came out, Sawyer was happily in bed and said he was “happy again!” Great. As long as happy means not crapping in your toy box, I’m happy too.

Fast forward to last night. Shelby had been wrestling with the boys all afternoon, and was trying to get them to wind down with a break from the WWE stunts. This, as usual, pissed Sawyer off and he threw one of his regular fits in the playroom while Shelby came downstairs to throw away a diaper. Upon going back upstairs and peeking quietly around the corner, he caught our once innocent son in the act – standing on the couch, toy bin placed below him on the floor, weapon of choice cocked and ready to fire. Oh boy.

He knew we knew what he was planning to do and didn’t protest to a time out. I had another talk with him, and all I can do is hope he understands why leaving his digested lunch for Mommy and Daddy to find later is totally not okay. I suggested drawing an angry picture when he’s mad instead, and then we can discuss it afterward. I’m kind of wishing I had thought of that the first time around, but it’s kinda like middle school – it takes a few days of getting juice dumped down your shirt at lunch before you figure out that if you throw some back, you’ll both get sent to the principal and since he likes you better, you won’t get in trouble. Well, not quite like that. But, true story.

The main issue I keep coming back to in this whole mess is, how does a kid even learn to do something like this? What teaches him that a good method of dealing with his anger is to plot revenge on those who he feels have wronged him? And how in the WORLD did he decide on revenge by poo and pee, of all things? I’m pretty confident that we haven’t taught him this sort of behavior, as we’re usually pretty diligent in watching the way we speak and act around our children. We put a lot of importance on talking to our children in a grown up and respectable manner and try to teach them that the best way to deal with a problem is to talk about it. We give them lots of opportunities to talk to us, and we try to make sure they feel that what they have to say is important.

All that to say that sometimes, despite your best efforts, shit just.. happens.

If you’ve dealt with anything like this before, I’d love to hear your story and any suggestions I may not have thought of.

My crazy intelligent, passionate, sensitive, inquisitive first born. Always making sure I don’t get too comfortable on my throne.

Potty Progress!

I just have to brag on Sawyer real quick.

After a long, long, loooooooong road of resistance and messes and tears and triumphs, he is FULLY POTTY TRAINED.

I can hardly believe it myself – this has definitely been the biggest parenting challenge to date. He was not an easy kid to train. All of you who just slap some underwear on your 18-month-old and have them mastering the toilet in a weekend can kiss my pregnant white butt. Because I’m here to tell ya, it’s not always like that. Oh man, is it not.

We started the process back when he was two and a half, so about a year ago. Yes, a YEAR. We went through lots of resistance in which case we would stop for a few weeks and then start again. He’d go back and forth between no accidents and pooping on his floor and painting the walls with it when he was supposed to be sleeping. NOT. FUN.

Finally, one day something clicked and he stopped having accidents and being obsessed with his own droppings. He’s been mostly accident-free at home for a few months now. Which left us to work on outings and bedtime. He was highly resistant to using any toilet but the one in our house so out in public was a challenge. But a few days ago, he did a 180 and started agreeing to go pee while we were out and about. He’s successfully gone on four or five outings now with no accidents so I’m calling that mastered!

As for nights – he has always been a heavy night-wetter. Would wake up soaked most of the time. We’ve been cutting back his liquids in the evening though and he was waking up dryer. Couple that with him thinking he was being slick by taking a crap in his diaper as soon as we put him to bed just so he could come back downstairs, and I was DONE with diapers. Last night was the final straw and I put him in some underwear and told him no more diapers, ever. I expected to be woken in the middle of the night to clean soaked sheets, but surprisingly, he went the whole night dry!! I was so proud.

So tonight is his second night in underwear. I made him some special fleece ones so in case he does wet the bed, it’ll be contained a little better. He’s already come down twice to potty though and peed both times, so I’m thinking he’s probably good for the night.

If you’re thinking of asking me for tips – don’t! I don’t know any. As if that isn’t obvious by the year it took to train my kid, haha. But seriously, I feel like I’m still clueless, and we get to start this whole process again with Beckett soon. But hey – at least now I won’t have three in diapers!