Tattoos and Drool

That’s my boy

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.

Bananas

About once every three days, one of the boys will ask to hold the baby. I relish in these occurrences because they’re short and sweet. They love their sister and don’t show any jealousy, but they also don’t really show a lot of interest very often either. So any time they want to hold her for .02 seconds, I let them.

Yesterday, Sawyer seemed to take an extra amount of interest in her, and I’d catch him from time to time laying next to her on the floor and telling her she was “the very cutiest girl ever” while patting her head. (Yes, it was just as freaking adorable as it sounds.)

He asked to hold her and I obliged, snuggling her into his lap as he wrapped his skinny arms around her and buried his nose in her hair. She started to fuss, which immediately evoked a response of, “Mommy, this girl is hungry.”

“Is she? Can you feed her?”

“Nope. I can’t.”

“Well why not?”

And then. THEN. He raised his shirt, and with an expression of complete seriousness on his face, he said, “Because. I don’t have any bananas on my belly.”

Nursing = na-nas (Beckett’s old pet term) = bananas = me peeing my pants. Damn kegels.

And really, I don’t know whether to be proud that he’s paid that much attention, or horrified that my boobs have surrendered to gravity so horribly that he thinks they’re on my stomach.

That Mom

I was about to post that despite all the boys in my house being sick for the past week, the baby and I have somehow managed to escape the germs thus far. But as soon as I say that, I’ll wake up with a skull full of snot and be picking more boogers out of Avonlea’s nose than I do already, so I won’t go there. Instead, I’ll say that I predict we’ll be hacking and snotting within a couple days, considering our faces have been the direct target of eleventeen sneezes over the past two days. You know, the whole droplet thing and all.

I kept Sawyer home from school yesterday, which broke my heart because it’s only his second week and the theme for the week was “my family.” He seemed much better by early evening yesterday so I decided he was fine to go back today. When I picked him up, his teacher informed me that he had green snot. WHAT. I had seen no such thing before I dropped him off and in fact didn’t think his nose had been running at all. But apparently it had and suddenly I was That Mom. The one everyone else silently crosses off the Christmas party list because she sends her sick kid to school to infect the entire preschool population.

Dudes, let me tell you, it’s more than humiliating to feel the other moms burning holes into the back of your head with their eyes while the teacher is smacking your hand for bringing green snot into her classroom. I’m kinda traumatized.

And speaking of school? He already brought home a book club order form. BOOK CLUB. You know, Scholastic? Dozens of book choices compiled into a little newsprint booklet? Yeah, he’s already point out seven books he wants. I thought I had at least one more year before this crap started. But at least it’s just books and not a hokey Christmas wrap and boxed candies fundraiser. Those I’m even less excited about.

Tomorrow there’s a meeting for the Parent Teacher Fellowship (our school’s version of the PTA) and I’m kind of not that excited about it. I’ve already scoped out the moms of his classmates and I’m quite easily one of the youngest, and definitely the least conservative. Doesn’t exactly make for an easy icebreaker. I’ll keep holding out hope that I’ll be pleasantly surprised, though.

I think deep down I’m just worried that no one will like me, and in turn, they won’t want their kids to be friends with mine. Yeah, apparently my middle school self-consciousness has snuck its way into adulthood. I guess now I’m That Mom too.

Trying not to worry too much – he does a decent job of attracting friends on his own.

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.