The Boy is 3. Don't Sing To Him.

The other night I put my son down to bed for the last time as a 2-year-old. As I lay down next to him to stroke his hair, the sentimentality of the moment coursing through me, I kissed him lovingly on the forehead and said, "It's your birthday tomorrow buddy. I can't believe you're going to be three."

To which he replied, "No I'm not. I don't love you."

The next day we set out for bagels at our favorite bagel place to kick off the birthday fun-tivites. Though he assured us that he didn't want a birthday, he wanted to eat at home, he didn't want us to sing and he didn't like any of us, we know that meant, "I love you guys so much! Please take me to Back East Bagel!" and so off we went. His attitude sweetened a bit once we started eating, aided immensely by the fact that we got him a chocolate chip bagel with strawberry cream cheese and all seemed right with the world. 

Until he started screaming for his fork and spoon to the top of his lungs. 

This wouldn't seem like a big deal on paper, as you aren't able to hear that my son pronounces the word "fork" exactly as one would pronounce the word "fuck". When screamed, the words "fork" followed by the word "and" blended together until it sounded like he was screaming "WHERE'S MY FUCKIN' SPOON?! I WANT MY FUCKIN' SPOON!" 

The people at the adjoining tables all turned to stare in horror as we gazed upon him with panic in our throats and did the only thing that any rational person would do. We screamed back at him, leading the conversation to go something like this.

Him: WHERE'S MY FUCKIN' SPOON?!

Us (in unison): YOU WANT YOUR FORK AND SPOON?! YOU'RE LOOKING FOR YOUR FORK AND SPOON?!

Him: GIMME MY FUCKIN' SPOON!

Other people:

We left shortly thereafter.

With a birthday party planned for the evening, I naturally saved all cleaning and decorating to the last fucking possible minute and spent the rest of the afternoon running around like a crazy person on four hours of sleep. You may ask yourself, "Why didn't you do any prep the night before if you stayed up so late? What were you doing?"

Like a genius, I chose to use all of the hours of kid free time the night before as they slept not to clean or organize efficiently but listening to Howard Stern and drawing a Pin The Tool on Handy Manny game. I won't stand for ANYONE saying that I don't know how to prioritize. 

I regret nothing

The birthday boy really pitched in during the pre-party chaos too.

Actually, this was more helpful than most anything else he could've done.

The party began and I gotta say, I was struck all day by the absolutely intrinsic differences between boys and girls. Julia woke up on her birthday and ran around in delight all day, relishing the birthday songs and attention, ooh-ing and ahh-ing over the decorations and begging for the party to start. Patrick could NOT have cared less. In fact, he seemed almost annoyed any time we tried to give him attention for it and insisted all day long that it wasn't his birthday. Some dudes are made. Others are born. He is an example of the latter. 

That's not to say he wasn't excited about certain things. The cake coaxed a little smile out of him.

Oreos and frosting and candy, oh my!

As did the fruit salad dump truck.

My shirt looked like I'd murdered someone after carving this.

His smile was quickly dashed, however, when we had the audacity to sit him at the table in front of his cake and sing Happy Birthday to him.

How is he pissed about this? How??

He became immediately annoyed at the opening strains of the birthday song and started to bury his face in my side. I moved around behind him, which prompted him to cover his eye and start angrily "shush-ing" everyone for the entire duration of the tune. Really dude? You have a chocolate cake that looks like a construction zone in front of you with Oreo crumbles making up the 3, all while a candle you get to blow out burns brightly as everyone you love in the whole world sings to you and this sucks for you? This is an inconvenience? 

Honestly, I couldn't stop laughing. The similarities between he and his dad are so incredibly apparent, even at this age, that i'ts absolutely mind boggling. Even if he IS angry that you kissed him good morning. He's a surly little shit. They both are. But they're my surly little shits and I wouldn't change a damn thing about either of them.

 

Happy 3rd Birthday, you salty goofball.

Visions Of Dinner Plates Dancing Through The Air

People always say, "Ugh. The terrible twos are the worst!" It's become so ubiquitous in our collective psyche that we take it as a foregone conclusion. If you have a child, when they reach the age of two they will become the spawn of hell. The people that assert this ever pervasive factoid are incorrect, however.

In fact, I think they are dirty liars.

Two is a cake walk. Two is a spring stroll through a park that fronts a small lake during a strawberry festival where the breeze wafts the heavenly scents of berries and funnel cake and the lilting music of children's laughter as they go around in a tightly controlled circle on a docile pony ride while their parents take pictures and smile contentedly up into the perfect blue sky while butterflies dance in the perfumed air. Two is fucking great.

"Terrible" twos my ass. This is amaze-balls!

The time for fear, my friends, is not two. At two a child has not had the time to level up enough in the game of life in order to unleash their full evil onto the world. They try, I will give them that. They cross their arms defiantly over their chests with a pouty look on their face and shout "No!" if they don't want to eat yogurt for a snack. If they're extremely afronted they may even add in a good foot stomp to punctuate their ire. But they're two. They're small and still kinda pudgy and their lips are all puckered in an attempt to scowl and their heads smell like the bath that they've just gotten. Frankly, try as they might, their baby anger is unimpressive at two and it's really kinda cute.

I'm like, "Are you effectively capturing how pissed off he is?"

And then they turn three.

Three takes the foot stomping, "No!" shouting and arm crossing to another level. Three adds in fun phrases like, "I don't want yogurt and I don't love you anymore!" Three adds the throwing of the yogurt container on the ground or into the sink along with the foot stomp and three adds a screaming melt down that lasts for twenty minutes to the ensuing time out they earned for the attitude problem and violent yogurt chucking you just endured.

I want to say I'm being a nurturing mother here, but I think I'm just counting to ten so I don't lose my shit.

My daughter was born with a strong personality and so all through the last year I've written stories that centered largely around her and the types of shennanigans she pulled along with my clueless and fairly ridiculous responses to them. I haven't been perfect at dealing with her. Far from it. However, as she neared four and began to show glimmers of self control and higher communication skills, the light at the end of the proverbial tunnel began to barely spark to life.

The days of screaming at me in malls are lessening...until she hits 15 and it ramps up again.

For several months, things were fairly quiet. We could go places and they would sit and eat their food.

Corn dogs and hats make for a great afternoon.

We became the freaking poster family for normalcy.

I mean, c'mon, we're like that stock photo family that comes in the frame when you buy it.

And then that which we'd already survived reared its head again and my son began to near three. My husband and I had tried to comfort ourselves during the worst of it with my daughter by asserting that Patrick's threes wouldn't be as bad. Their personalities are very different and we just couldn't imagine that he would reach the levels of hysteria, stubbornness and outright psychosis that Julia did.

We were right that his threes would be different. Our theory that they would be better was shot down to a million pieces.

I don't even know where to begin. First off, he has developed a love affair with the toilet. It started with his overwhelming compulsion to place entire rolls of toilet paper in them.

Really?

To my knowledge he has flushed toilet paper, hair bands, pieces of foam from the memory foam mattress cover that now covers my bed in a piecemeal fashion, dog food, fruit snacks, change and small toys. That's only what I know about. Oh, and he also flushed two toothbrushes down there. I know about those because the toilet was hopelessly clogged for two days until we could get a plumber out to snake it for $85. Most expensive Spiderman and Strawberry Shortcake toothbrushes in the country.

He also has a hair trigger when he wakes up now.

Between the two of them, even though Julia's behavior has markedly improved, I find myself on the verge of hysteria at least 50% of the time. After an ill fated trip to Whole Foods, the refusal of both kids to clean up the Mega Blocks strewn across the house like land mines and fight after fight over who had the cape made out of the Curious George material first I found myself on the brink of insanity this evening. I had stayed calm, I had used my words, I had employed better strategies and if I could just get their pizza on plates and finish up my pasta we'd be home free.

I brought their meals to the table and turned to finish preparing mine when I heard behind me, "Patrick has the penguin plate! I want the penguin plate!"

I turned slowly and pinned her with my eyes. "I gave you the Minnie Mouse plate. You love that one."

She was undeterred and, reaching for her brother's plate, continued her furious protestations. "I hate the Minnie plate! I want the penguin plllllaaaaaatttttteeeeee!"

Ladies and gentlemen, behold our next exhibit! This one is a truly grotesque and terrifying oddity! I give you, the certifiably insane, Plate Throwing Mom!

I stormed over to the cabinet, yanked a second penguin plate out and marched back over to the table where I dumped her pizza in an unceremonious heap into the center of it before I stomped over to the back door.

"You hate the Minnie plate? You never have to deal with it again then!"

And with that, I threw the Minnie Mouse plate (it is plastic. I'm not homicidal, I'm merely an asshole) like a frisbee during a rousing game on a sunny beach toward the back alley. It sailed majestically from my back door, over my yard and then just bounced off of the cinder block wall with enough force to cause several shards to break free and scatter in different directions like a melamine fireworks display before disappearing from sight. It was like being at a fabulous Greek restaurant for a birthday party only the party is really angry and irrational. And in an alley.

I can't take the whining about this plate! Oopah!

At this point my son is screaming at me and my daughter is demanding that I go out into the alley and bring the plate back. I sat down to the table with my dinner and calmly ate like Nero watching Rome burn. They slowly realized that I was not going to be retrieving the plate any time soon and settled into eating their pizza. Dinner was on the quiet side.

I think it's going to be another interesting year.

I Want Daddy

Over the weekend I was living it up with a basket of laundry to fold and a particularly rousing episode of Jeopardy! on the tube when I heard a weird noise coming from my daughter’s room. To the casual observer it would have just been a little cough. To mom ears, it was the death knell.

please don't let it be barf, please don't let it be barf, please don't let it be barf

We had barf.

Nothing works me into a neurotic lather like vomit. I can handle pretty much any illness without batting an eye, but when vomit is involved, I immediately become Woody Allen on the inside. I’m terrified I’m going to get it, I don’t want to touch it, I don’t want to look at it long enough to clean it, I don’t want to smell it and I don’t want to interact with it.  You know that friend in college that would hold your hair back while you were puking up grape flavored Bartles and Jaymes in the front yard of that dude’s house that you guys met at the ASU game? I’m not that friend. I’m not even the friend who is pointing and laughing. I’m the friend who’s running back into the house with her fingers in her ears while going “La la la la” to block out all the noise you’re making and now all the noise I’m making with my theatrical gagging . Yes, your terrible misfortune and inability to hold down cloyingly sweet chick liquor will make me the bitchy friend. This aversion runs so deep that it led to my husband and I agreeing before we had kids that all poop related mishaps would fall squarely on my shoulders while all situations involving vomit would be left solely to him.

I'm not in this picture because I peaced right on out of there.

Of course fate is a spiteful whore and with the exception of one episode, I’ve been the sole parental unit available each and every time a kid in this house has lost their lunch.

Maybe it was born of the fact that I was the only one around and HAD to take charge or maybe there is something to the adage that things coming out of your kids seem less vile to you than if they’d come out of someone else’s cake hole but my whole reaction to barf has changed.  Don’t get me wrong, if you hork in front of me you’re still on your own, but my kids just don’t elicit that reaction. I jump into action, cleaning them up and administering Gatorade like a pro with nary a gag to be heard. As a person, I've grown.

Which brings me to the coughing sound that rang out in the night right in the middle of Double Jeopardy! last Friday. I walked into Julia’s room to see that she had in fact become sick, not just all over herself and her bed but the wall beside her bed too. I cleaned her up, changed her sheets, Lysol-ed the wall, put on Frozen and made a little nest for myself on her floor next to the trash can I’d commandeered from the bathroom. We’d get through this together, for I was Super Mom.

Oh yeah, this is me.

    

 The process was repeated again 10 minutes later when it was deemed more comfortable to toss her cookies a second time on her fresh sheets and pillow instead of the trash can. I changed everything again, all while being as comforting as I could be. The poor kid looked pathetic and I really did feel horrible for her. With a lot of “Mommy’s here” and “Mommy will take care of you”, I dragged her mattress out to the family room and plopped down on the couch (Laying on her floor for 10 minutes was enough. I’m not 21 anymore and nothing proves that more than lying on a floor for any duration of time. Even Super Mom has her joints to consider.)

Poor kid

Back rubbing, hair holding, soothing words and calming singing abounded as I held the trash can under her head and willed her to get everything up so she could feel better. By 2:30am I was bleary eyed and worried, having done everything in my power to make her feel as comfortable as possible. As the dry heaves racked her body once more and I rubbed her back, whispering softly to her that it would be alright, that mommy was here, she said:

“I <gak> want <gak> Daddy.”

Really? I mean, seriously? I’m the one who just hosed you down, rinsed your mouth out, wiped up the Kandinsky painting you tried to replicate on your wall, wrestled your mattress down the hall and into the family room and did two loads of laundry in the middle of the night, all while taking shifts holding your hair back and cooing to you while you chundered up so much that I’m pretty sure a license plate came out of you and you want daddy?

The best mothers will say that they understand, that they don’t expect recognition for all that they do. They’d say that it’s a normal reaction, that 4-year-old girls are attached to their daddy’s and it’s natural for them to want his comfort.

Well, I've never claimed to be the best mother and I’m here to tell you that shit sucked.

All I wanted to do was make her feel better, to be the soothing presence that people think of when they think about their mama. Her words made me feel like I’d failed, like if I’d been doing a good enough job taking care of her she wouldn't feel as though she needed daddy to step in. I wasn't merely not good enough, I wasn't even enough period.

The better animal, in this instance, being Daddy.

I realize, with my head, that my thinking was highly over dramatic and that her desire to have daddy near was in no way intended as a rejection of me, but I still sat sullenly on the couch as she finally fell into a fitful sleep, my eyes burning with exhaustion and my hair stinking of hospital grade disinfectant. Why was I chopped liver? Was my position as the primary care giver causing a case of overexposure? Was a feeling of ambivalence, or worse, resentment resulting from my constant directives to clean rooms, put on shoes, finish homework, eat two more bites, take fingers out of noses, put the toys away, try to go potty before we leave, go to time out, stop licking the dog bowl, don’t throw that inside, that isn’t food, my phone isn’t a football, wipe that up, drink some more milk, keep your diaper on, don’t unbuckle yourself on the freeway, no we can’t listen to Let It Go again, don’t sit on your brother’s face, and stop punching your sandwich?

The worst of it seemed to pass and around 4 in the morning I gingerly attempted to roll off of the couch to go to the bathroom without waking her.

“Don’t leave me, Mommy.”

Her small, whispered voice stopped my heart.  I kissed her forehead and promised I was just going to the bathroom, a certain clarity settling into my thoughts. She didn’t love me or need me less than she did Daddy. The fact was, she loved and needed both of us. The nature of his job required him to be out of the house for longer durations than me, which meant that she was far more likely to ask for him in times of stress. You don’t ask for stuff that you already have, so my being the ever present thorn in her side just meant that she took for granted that I’d be there. She hadn’t been asking for Daddy instead, she’d been asking for Daddy too.

I felt like a petty little moron for getting so butt hurt over it, but as I watched her sleep while clutching her blankie I was a happy, petty little moron. It was clear that the assumption was I’d be there to take care of things when everything went to hell in a hand basket. She felt confident that I would be there for her. I fell asleep myself, knowing that at least in this, I’d done something exactly right.