Bedtime has become a fiasco. Mommy, something hurts. (The mysterious unspecified “something.” If I pretend to be sick, maybe she won’t make me stay in my room by myself.) Mommy, come check on me. Mommy, be in my room while I drink water. You be a mama turtle and I’ll be a baby cat (all the better to outrun the mama turtle). Mommy, leave the door open a big bit.
And tonight: “Mommy, what shall I do?”
Try to distract me with an impressive display of grammar, will you? No dice, kid. GO TO SLEEP!
DB is very good at entertaining himself. He gets engrossed in driving his cars or his trains, or in building roads and tracks for the cars and trains to drive on, and will concentrate for 15 or 20 minutes – plenty of time for mommy to take a shower.
Or not. Last time I tried this, he started talking to me through the door as I was getting ready. “Look, mommy! I’m pulling a heavy load!” (Fortunately NOT referring to his pants.) I poked my head out and reminded him that once I got in the shower, I wouldn’t be able to hear him.
“Okay, mommy. I’ll leave you alone,” he replied. “Enjoy your shower!”
Somehow I missed Diabolical Boy’s implied “heh heh heh” at the end of that statement, and showered in blissful ignorance until he came bounding into the bathroom.
“Look what I found!” Uh oh. He’s holding a brick of something, but without my glasses I have no hope of identifying it.
“What did you find?”
“Bread!” With this hint, I can now tell that the object in his hand is half of a dinner roll that had been left, wrapped in a napkin, in a bowl in the middle of the dining room table. To find it, DB would have had to leave footprints on the tablecloth. And he undoubtedly already had this little expedition in mind when he wished me a happy shower.
So I don’t provide those opportunities anymore. I shower at night, or in the afternoon before fetching the boy from school. Because bringing bread rolls into the bathroom is funny; scaling the bookshelves and toppling them onto oneself, or helping oneself to the contents of the knife drawer, not so much.
DB has amazing eyesight. Or rather, amazing visual acuity [n. shrewdness, acuteness of perception]. He can look out of the window and see a brown speckled bird in the brown speckled grass. He points out every airplane passing through our portion of sky. From the middle of the back seat of the car, he can spot a tow truck in a parking lot a block away. Nothing escapes this kid’s notice.
Nothing. Including tiny little specks of whatever that find their way into his bathwater. “It’s a bug!” he shouts, pointing to a minuscule drifting puff of sock lint. “Get it OUUUWWTT!!” A flake of leaf, a hair; any Unidentified Floating Object elicits the same reaction. I should keep a little aquarium net on hand, or maybe a coffee filter, to make sure the water is sufficiently uncontaminated for Dirt Boy to wash in.
He may grow out of this little neurosis, especially if he takes after his mother and requires corrective lenses at an early age. (If you can’t see the junk in the water, it can’t upset you.) If not, there’s a simple solution. Cleaning the bathroom to the desired standard will become HIS responsibility.
Want to have some fun? (Or earn yourself a few moments of silence in a frantic day?) Tell your resident three-year-old who is demanding to see a school bus to “keep your eyes peeled.”
(Freeze. Especially the eyes.)
(Pause.)
(Palpable electric current in the air as synapses fire while he searches his vocabulary and not-so-vast life experience trying to make sense of what he just heard.)
I wasn’t trying to be mean; I just tossed off the expression without thinking about how DB, living in the strictly literal world of Late Toddlerville, would attempt to interpret it. I took pity on him and was starting to explain, when he quavered, “I’m keeping my eyes field” (or possibly “feeled” – I really have no idea).
In case you are now wondering (as I was) where this expression comes from, it’s not as colorful an origin as you might think. It came into usage in print in the U.S. around 1850 and basically just means “keep your eyelids open.” Well, duh.
Phew. Something to write about that doesn’t involve You Know What.
I am going to give myself such a dope-slap when I realize I’ve actually published this post with that title. As I said earlier, I’m an agonizer. (“It’s cute!” “No, it’s offensive!” “No, it’s just lame!” “But you only have six readers!” “Yes, but if I offend my mother and her friends, who else will read the blog?” Etc.) But here’s the deal: DB is in the process of learning important skills that will – if he is fortunate – serve him well for many years to come. And in order to respect his privacy in this arena, I shall not be describing our adventures for all the world to read. But since this topic is consuming much of our collective time and energy these days, we are on hiatus (not that you will notice, given our rather spotty publishing schedule).
Hello. My name is Katherine. And I’m an agonizer.
Fortunately I have learned over time not to fret about EVERYthing; I no longer second-guess myself endlessly over, say, what I should have on my burger at Five Guys. I still, however, spend a ridiculous amount of energy stewing over what I should be doing with my life. At age 39 (close enough), I continue to ponder what I’m going to be when I grow up. Assuming that “growing up” will happen someday. If one of the marks of a mature person is that she does not run or leap through the halls of her workplace – which is neither hospital nor nuclear facility (which might justify the running) nor ballet school – then I’m not there yet.
Oughtn’t I to be out saving the world, or saving the planet, or doing some marvelous thing to make my community a better place? I know people who are engaged in these ministries, and they impress the heck out of me. How do they do it, I wonder. Where do they find the time and energy? Aha, I finally realize: they don’t have children. The Dear Boy is not a high-maintenance kid, but he still requires (and deserves) most of my available resources.
Happily, I seem to have gotten a very nice Christmas present this year. Maybe it’s that I got rested up over the holidays and therefore have a better attitude in general; maybe it’s the grace of God. I’m starting to feel content with just being Mom, and it is a welcome change. I may not be saving the world, but I am doing something constructive if I spend my time and energy raising my son to be a responsible citizen. During this season of my life, while DB is small and I have a lot of influence on him, it might be okay to let it be my main purpose in life to take care of him. When he goes off to college I’ll have plenty of time to end world hunger, bring peace to the Middle East, and earn a World Series title for the Chicago Cubs.
I knew the time would come that DB would grow out of his little-boy ways of speaking. He’s all Mr. Complete Sentences now – the other morning he looked out the window and said, “Somebody is sweeping snow off the sidewalk across the street.” No kidding. Complete, grammatically correct, perfectly pronounced, and alliterative to boot. My kind of kid.
But I’m going to miss his adorable inside-out pronunciation of the word “music.” This peculiarity has persisted long after “kys” (where airplanes fly) and “sown” (that white stuff somebody was sweeping) were corrected. On Tuesday, he started saying “music” and hasn’t gone back.
January 11, 2011. The day the “meekis” died.
Amazing but true: DB does not always cooperate instantly when I ask him to do something.
There are times when this doesn’t matter. I build extra time into the bath schedule, for example, because I know that we will spend many minutes debating over whether the shirt should come off or not. I am prepared for this contingency, and have already entered the Zen-like frame of mind that is necessary for said debates.
At other times, however – especially when I’m hungry and trying to get us ready for work and school in the morning – I lose my cool when DB is not instantly compliant. I have to walk away to avoid shouting at him (which never works anyway – it only makes him laugh and squirm harder). One morning I leave his room in a huff, semi-justified because he won’t let me change his soggy diaper. I go to get myself dressed, attempt to regain my composure. Before long, I can hear him in his room – crowing “I did it! I did it!”
What has he done, I wonder. Taken off the diaper by himself? Will I find a spectacular mess when I go into his room? Tentatively, I open the door. No dirty diaper on the bed. Where is DB? Yikes. Daredevil Boy has climbed up onto the rickety, far-too-small-for-him changing table, by himself. Ready for diaper change! How he can have achieved this without pulling the whole thing down on top of his head, I cannot imagine. He is very pleased with himself. “I did it!” he sings. Look ma, I’m cooperating! You DO want to change my diaper, don’t you?
Looks like it is time to move toward “mission accomplished” on the potty training. Or at least “mission attempted.”
Oh, the tales we tell to avoid having to get out of a nice warm bed in the middle of the night. My husband and I used to live in an apartment house in which the fellow upstairs was a graduate student in Robotics. One night when a strange rhythmic mechanical-strain sound awoke us at 3 am, H blamed it on the neighbor. “That’s probably just Frank building a robot. Go back to sleep.” Of course it was NOT Frank; it was the death song of the boiler that fed our house’s radiators, and since the house’s owner had wisely appointed H as the maintenance supervisor (to spare himself these middle-of-the-night calls, no doubt) we did not get to go back to sleep.
Last night it was my turn to invent a fairy tale, as I awoke around midnight to the sound of splashing. “The city must be flushing the gutters with one of those big water-spraying trucks,” I told myself from under the covers. “In the middle of the night. In the winter.” Dang. Investigation revealed a relief valve on the hot water heater, doing its job by spewing water at high pressure all over the furnace. It’s not a nice feeling to venture down into the basement and see the flames of the gas-fired appliances reflected in the growing puddle on the floor.
All is well, however. I figured out how to shut off not only the water, but the water heater flame as well, and the furnace for good measure (in case getting thoroughly doused is not good for it). It’s not THAT cold out. I used the water that I mopped up to flush the toilets. And no heat or hot water means lower utility bills!
What is it with this kid and his milk and bananas? I must go to the grocery store three times a week for these items. (Enjoy it while it lasts, say the moms of older boys. When he’s a teenager, you’ll be shopping three times a DAY.) Perhaps if he expanded his list of edible foods, we wouldn’t need to rely so heavily on these two. He has learned from somewhere (I suspect his playmates at day care) that green foods belong to a certain category, so no matter what I put on his plate – peas, broccoli, string beans, guacamole – he will announce “I don’t like vegetables.” He could be the poster child for food rejection. He squinches up his eyes, turns his head away, holds up the hand to signal a fervent “NO!” Yet somehow he manages to eat a bite, without complaining or making a face, when a bite is required before more bananas or milk will be served. If I could get him to eat blindfolded and accept or reject foods based on taste alone, I think we’d be in business.
Ha. I am fully expecting the pediatrician to tell me, when we go for Discerning Boy’s checkup next month, that he shows deficiencies in most nutrients except for spectacular levels of potassium and vitamin D.
