Category: parenting

Toddler Life, Chapter 211: The Daycare Demon

Pavowski2 Comments

Our kids have recently gone into daycare. And there are a host of parental tribulations that go along with that. What will the children learn outside of the house that we don’t want them to learn yet? What if they get sick? What if they hate us later? What if a helicopter crashes into the building? (Some of the fears are more rational than others.)

For better or worse, our kids have been fairly isolated in their development so far. Sprout the First was in daycare or in the care of his grandparents for a couple days a week  for a few months after he turned 1 — and he spent time with a few other kids, maybe three or four, during that time. And the kids have some cousins around their age, and some friends of ours (my wife’s and mine) have kids their age as well. But on the regular? It’s just been us.

Which is good and bad.

Good because, if they’re doing something, we can pretty easily isolate the cause. We know, for example, that when Sprout the First began telling his stuffed animals to “shut your piehole,” that we needed to start examining our, uh, turns of phrase around the boy. Good because, as a general rule, we can control the things that go into their tiny and developing brains.

Bad because, well, variety is the spice of life and all that. Maybe we shelter them too much. Maybe they need more interaction with kids their age. Maybe they need to hear the crazy beliefs of other adults in the world.

But I’ll tell you what’s definitely bad about sending them to daycare.

The Daycare Demon.

The Daycare Demon goes to your child’s daycare.

He’s the first child whose name your bright-and-beautiful offspring learns, because it’s the name he hears the most.

He’s the one you can pick out without anybody particularly pointing to him, because naturally he’s the one hanging from the curtains with fingerpaint all over his face, brandishing a paintbrush like a rapier.

He’s the one you begin to hate from afar because you just know that, through toddler osmosis, your precious darling is picking up on his bad habits.

Our Daycare Demon is definitely not named Fred, but I will call him Fred for the sake of not calling him by his real name, which causes my blood to boil and my face to distort as if I’ve chomped down on an enchilada full of ground-up bulls’ testicles and not ground beef, as I had previously supposed.

Every day, Sprout the First comes home with nothing but Fred to talk about. “Miss Smith told Fred to sit down or he wouldn’t get a sticker.” “Fred was getting in trouble because he wouldn’t come inside.” “Fred said I’m a baby.”

Fred is the one who, the first time I dropped the kids off at daycare for real, came and laid a square solid tackle on my knee and grinned up at me like the Joker. Fred is the one who, now that I have to comfort Sprout the First when I drop him off (because he’s upset about not staying at home all day), sticks his nose into our business and asks me WHAT ARE YOU DOING until a teacher can snatch him away. Fred is the one at whose name I brace for impact: what has he done today?

And I know. I get it. He’s just a kid. It’s not his fault. But that doesn’t change the fact that Fred has become something of a magnet for all my unquantifiable but vaguely negative feelings about putting my kids in daycare. It’s comforting to think that I can ascribe all the negative episodes, the questionable interactions, the dubious phrases brought home, to some anonymous ragamuffin.

It’s become a bit of a running joke at our house, to ask what the Daycare Demon has done today. Sprout the First always comes home with Fred’s name on his tongue. And that makes us laugh. But then, when we ask Sprout what he did that day, or who he played with, often the Demon’s name will come out. And that’s maybe a little troubling. Sprout might be fixating on him because he gets his name called so often (even for the wrong reasons). Sprout might be fixating on him because he’s loud and has his nose in everything like a coked-up bloodhound. Sprout might just think that the Demon is cool, whatever cool means to a three-year-old.

Still, there’s nothing to do about it. Fred is gonna stay crazy. So, for way too much time every day, my kid is flying in the same orbit as the Demon. And maybe that’s not the best thing. But it at least reassures me that my kid isn’t the Demon.

Not yet, anyway.

Toddler Life, Chapter 121: Mornings Mean Nothing

Pavowski10 Comments

A toddler’s life is nothing but phases. A biting phase. A throwing things phase. A take-your-pants-off-and-ride-the-cats-around-the-house phase. Some phases are over in a few days, others drag out for weeks. But rest assured, if the little ones are waist-high or lower, they’re in a phase.

The newest phase is one that needs to be over immediately if not sooner, though I fear it’s one of those marked end date indeterminate. This is the morning means nothing phase, AKA the sprout is his own alarm clock phase, AKA abandon all sleep ye who enter here phase.

Parental sleep deprivation is no joke. To be honest, my wife and I have been somewhat lucky in this department. Big brother started sleeping through the night around 6 months, and little sis at about 8. They still have their moments — the cutting of teeth in an infant is enough to make grown daddies and mommies cry — but for the most part they sleep okay. This is in sharp contrast to a co-worker of mine who wakes up eight or nine times PER NIGHT with her rugrat. Look, it may be a tiny human, and it may need your utmost care and attention, but eight or nine wakeups per night is not really even in the range of the Geneva conventions. You could break Navy SEALS with that kind of treatment.

But the morning means nothing phase is a new animal. Because with your run-of-the-mill midnight baby wakeup call, you get to go back to sleep. It may be fitful sleep, and it may take you a while, but you get to drop off again. In the morning means nothing phase, your only hope is to go to sleep as soon as possible after the child goes down, because the kid is going to wake up, for good and with no hope of going back to sleep, whenever he damn well feels like it. 5 AM? Bet on it. 4? The sprout laughs at 4.  3:30? Challenge accepted.

It’s bad enough that we’re coming out of our summer coma, still drunk on the heady fumes that sleeping until 6:30 brings. School schedule has us waking up by 5:30 on a regular day, so those last few minutes of sleep are critical. But the sprout cares not for those crucial final minutes.

File:Trento-Mercatino dei Gaudenti-alarm clocks.jpg© Matteo Ianeselli / Wikimedia Commons, via Wikimedia Commons

The devil on his shoulder nudges him awake at eye-twitch o’clock, and he crashes around his room for a while. (With big brother, there is no such thing as quiet play.) He builds and knocks over towers of blocks. He topples toddler chairs. He hurls stuffed animals about like a twister in a trailer park. Then he’s out into the hallway, where he turns on every light along the way, because he’s terrified of the dark like a vampire flees from the light. Then, because he can only be unsupervised for so long without somebody telling him NOT to do whatever he’s doing before his tiny brain melts down, he comes knocking on our door.

But not so much knocking as tentatively peeking his head inside, like a cat burglar working up his nerve. Let me not omit the fact that he can’t properly open a door yet, so he rattles the knob for a good ten seconds first. He ducks in, then ducks out, then ducks in, and ducks out again, then:

“Daddy?”

We try to ignore him, because that’s sure to work. When it comes to picking up hints, he’s about as sensitive as an elbow wrapped in a steel sleeve. He tries again.

“Mommy? Daddy? I’m ready to be awake.”

I slide one eye open, the lid fluttering like a garage door off its track. The clock reads 3:45. “Buddy, go back to sleep.”

The whining begins. He’s saying words, but I can’t hear them, because the pitch, pace and warble of his tiny voice has short-circuited every brain function outside of the purely survival-oriented lobes. I gruffly snarl at him to just get into bed with us.

I know as I say it that this is the wrong move, because the three-year-old does not make for a pleasant bedmate. He doesn’t so much toss and turn as thrash and burn, rolling over and over like a Tasmanian devil off its axis, beating his head against the pillow and kicking viciously at my kidneys.

Somehow I endure this for an entire fifteen minutes, pretending that I will be able to get back to sleep with the munchkin drumming out Chopsticks on my spine. Then my wife, who was sleeping on the opposite side of the boy and I (me in between them), has had enough and yanks him over to her side of the bed. His bag of tricks continues and we both sit there, steaming in our inability to even catch a whiff of further sleep. But it’s thirty minutes before the alarm goes off, and we are NOT getting up yet.

Ten minutes more is all I can stand, so out into the hall we stumble, him bounding along with infuriating energy, me stubbing my drowsy toes on every toy he strewed across the carpet. Along the way, he bumps a baby toy that begins chirping out a truly lunatic calliope version of the Wheels on the Bus at a volume which, to be conservative, is fargoing ridiculous. Meanwhile, our dumbest cat has launched himself at the dumb, sleep-addled dog — three times his size — and wrapped it in a clawed kitty headlock, and the two tussle, stumble and crash into the baby’s door.

So now the baby’s awake, too.

I trudge into her room and pull her out of the crib — she reeks of poop, because why wouldn’t she — haul her downstairs with big brother squawking like a tone-deaf crow about how he wants cupcakes, he wants to watch Grover, he wants to go to the playground later, he wants chocolate milk. All I want to do is get her changed and put on some cartoons so that I can lie down on the couch and at least close my eyes for five minutes before my actual alarm goes off.

This is the second day in four days that he’s done this.

The morning means nothing. Clocks are obsolete. The day starts when the sprout wakes up, and woe betide any foolish enough to suppose otherwise.

Every Single Night (A Broken Bedtime Routine)

Pavowski4 Comments

Kids are smart, yeah?

My son is so smart, he’s running the house right now. He hates bedtime. Going up to his own little room while there is still life happening downstairs absolutely crushes him. He has crippling fear of missing out. And he has learned how to twist his fear to take advantage of ours.

See, his little sister goes to bed about an hour ahead of him, which he’s fine with. Her room is across the hall from his, and… well, let’s just say the walls are pretty thin. You can easily hear another person talking on the other side of any wall in the house, let alone screaming. So when we put him to bed, he screams.

We’ll come to what he’s screaming about in a moment, but the takeaway is, we feel incredibly hamstrung. Intellectually we know that giving him any sort of attention for the screaming only reinforces the behavior. On the other hand, every second we let him go on screaming is another second that might wake his 1-year-old sister, and coaxing the baby back to bed is a taller order than convincing the boy to do the same. (Also, if she doesn’t get enough sleep, she can seriously put the screws to us the next day.)

So, my wife is losing sleep, and I’m losing sleep, and bedtime is now one of the most stressful times of day. It takes upwards of an hour to get both of the bundles of joy down to sleep, and putting big brother down is a recursive process that seriously drives us to distraction every single night.

Which brings us to what he screams about. This is really best described as a series of steps:

  1. I announce bedtime. He screams because he doesn’t want to go to bed.
  2. I threaten to carry him upstairs to bed. (This works because he is at the age where he wants to do everything himself). He relents.
  3. I tell him to brush his teeth. He screams because he doesn’t want to brush his teeth.
  4. I say, fine, come get dressed for bed. (This works because he really does want to brush his teeth and he doesn’t want to miss out on an excuse to noodle around in the bathroom for five minutes.) He relents.
  5. We read a book. These days it’s a seek-n-find the differences between pictures book of all his favorites: Cars, Toy Story, that kind of thing, but whatever it is, he only wants to read this one book for weeks at a time. This makes him happy.
  6. We sing some bedtime songs in the rocking chair. This works, because he loves to sing.
  7. It’s bedtime. I crawl into bed with him, because this is what he demands, and tell him he can have the usual five minutes. For five minutes, there is peace.
  8. Time to go. I get up. He screams because he knows he’s about to be on his own, which he can’t stand. I tell him I’m not listening to this nonsense: it’s time for bed. I leave the room and listen to him scream for about five minutes or so, hoping to god he won’t wake the baby. He’s screaming about one of these things:
    1. He wants his door cracked.
    2. He wants a stuffed animal.
      1. But not the stuffed animal he has with him, a different one that’s across the room.
    3. He wants to read another book.
    4. He wants to rock some more.
    5. He wants his door closed.
    6. He wants me to lay down with him again (if mommy was the last one in the room).
    7. He wants mommy to rock him (if it was me putting him to bed).
  9. He might reuse and rotate these excuses, but he’ll use them liberally just to get my wife or myself back into the room. He’ll work his way down the list, strongarming us into coming back to his room three or four times over before he spots the inadvertent eye twitch or pulsing blood vessel in my forehead that tells him the gig is up.
  10. He asks for a kiss in the most pitiful way possible, gets it, and rolls over to go to sleep.

Again, I know that indulging him is the wrong thing to do, but I really think he’s figured out that we have to see to him to keep from waking up the baby.

The three-year-old has outsmarted the college-educated adults.

The Toddler Wobbles (or, the Tripwire of Self-Doubt)

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My daughter is this close to walking.

She’s been doing the “cruising” thing for about a month now, where she’ll grab the edge of a table, or the couch, or the leg of my shorts, and just sort of shimmy along, one shaky step after another; but of course, she can only go where whatever she’s clamped onto can take her. And she’s been walking assisted for several weeks beyond that, holding gleefully to the hands of whoever has the patience and the dorsal fortitude to bend over and escort her around the house. Again, of course, she can go only where her guide takes her.

There is an unmitigated joy about her as she does any of these things. Her little stumpy legs clomp along not unlike those of the imperial walkers in Star Wars, stable enough only if everything goes according to plan. She laughs, shrieks, smiles. Then tumbles.

But she won’t walk on her own.

And I know, I know. She’ll get it in time. But there’s something frustrating and heartbreaking in seeing her shuffling along, a wobbly snowman on stilts, and knowing that she could walk if she would only decide that she had the capability.

She’s done it before.

She’ll cruise along the table for a minute, then pick up a toy and turn and totter over to the sofa — a yawning gulf of two steps or so, but a moonshot in the scope of toddlers. I’ll stand her up in the floor across from her mother, and she’ll hold my hands until she’s within a step of her mother, then detach in time to fall forward into her mom’s loving embrace. She has the strength. She has the balance. What she doesn’t have is the knowledge that she’s perfectly capable.

Now, she can crawl with the best of them. In fact, she can muster so much speed on her hands and knees that it’s a little startling: she can cross a room in just a couple of seconds, and be sitting there angelic as ever when you come back in from getting a glass of water. This, paired with her propensity (and joy) for grabbing things and sticking them in her mouth is enough, almost, to keep you from leaving the room at all when she’s around (what if she pulls the TV over on herself, or what if she swallows the dog, or what if she goes into the garage, fires up the pneumatic hammer, and takes out the retaining wall?). An inability to walk isn’t, in other words, keeping her from getting around.

But when she starts walking, she’ll be so much better off — she’ll be faster, she’ll be able to take things with her, she’ll be able to reach her hands up and hug your knee when she walks by. She needs to walk. She just won’t.

I can’t say it’s fear, because she isn’t afraid of falling. She’ll gladly pitch herself sideways while my wife or I holds her, despite the five-foot drop to the ground that surely awaits if she manages to escape. It’s as if she simply doesn’t grasp the idea that walking instead of crawling might be a better way to do it. Like cave dwellers who won’t take the ipod that’s being proffered to them, believing instead that eating worms and running from daylight is better than the natural next phase in human evolution (selfies and social media, of course). She just doesn’t realize that she’s hamstringing herself by keeping to all fours, doesn’t understand that her muscles and her sense of balance are ready for her to walk, doesn’t get how much her world is going to open up for her when she begins to walk.

She’ll get it eventually. One day — maybe tomorrow, maybe next week — she’ll shuffle off on her own and then my wife and I will really be in trouble — but until then, she’s stuck crawling, cruising, and being escorted everywhere she goes. Which works, but when you consider the alternative, is a bit lousy.

But then it got me thinking. (As such things often do.)

If my baby has the capacity to walk, but lacks the knowledge of that capacity, what am I capable of that I just haven’t grasped yet? If she’s only holding off on taking her first steps because she doesn’t realize that she can, what am I keeping myself from just because I lack the belief in myself?

How much more could we be, if we could only believe we were capable?

Are you crawling, when you should be walking?

De-Grumpified

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How do you measure a day?

For the longest time, I’ve been a Grinch about virtually every holiday. Christmas, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Valentine’s… you name it, I can give you a good reason to hate it.

Christmas? Over-commercialized. Flimsy reason for overspending and going into debt around the same time every year. Based loosely off some religious gobbledygook wrapped around a Russian mythology that bears virtually no resemblance to the fat man in the sled who apparently runs the show these days. Pure invention, for the sake of blackmailing kids into being good for a few months out of the year. Can it.

Halloween? If you feel the need to disguise yourself once a year, to let your “wild side” or whatever out of your system, you probably aren’t living your life right. If you’re an adult and you’re dressing up for a halloween party, you missed the memo that it’s time to grow up. If you’re a kid and your parent is driving you around to trick or treat, you’re doing it wrong… in my day we WALKED house to house. If you’re a teenager… get off my freakin’ lawn. Also, a poor excuse for making me buy a bunch of candy that I’m going to have to eat later.

Thanksgiving? Yeah, does the rest of the world need a signifier that we Americans take things to excess? So we have a holiday for the express purpose of eating ourselves into comas. Pass the gravy and the weird uncles, and I’ll be in the corner nibbling on cornbread until the in-laws are strangling each other over political issues.

Valentine’s? The canned argument is that if you need a specific day to show your special somebody that you love them, you’re doing it wrong. But I won’t even go there. I’ll fall back on the fact that this one is another one that’s pure invention, and who can stand all that red and pink? And, for that matter, the overnight megainflation of flower stock. Racketeering sanctioned by the people.

The list goes on, but you get the idea. I don’t go in for holidays or birthdays or any of that. My wife hates it, but I can’t help it. Any holiday is just a futile attempt to add significance to an otherwise insignificant day, a way to add punctuation to another year.

Uplifting, right?

But our son is three this year. And our daughter is coming up on one.

And… dammit, everything is different. I find my Grinchly armor cracking at the seams, I feel the warmth of caring and celebration clawing its way into my cold, cold heart. Like… okay, this year was the first year he really cared about Christmas at all. In years past it was just a pile of toys that he got excited about for a few hours and then forgot about. But this year, he freaked out about Santa, and he jumped up and down on the morning of and he was talking about Santa Claus all day, and … god, it warmed my heart.

A chink in the armor.

And today, Easter.

Say what you want about religious connotations, but Easter is another holiday that’s had America’s grasping capitalist claws rending at it. The bunny, the chocolates, the eggs… honestly it sounds like one big acid trip if you ask me. Ridiculous. Ripe and ready for my scorn. And scorn it I have, and did this year, too… right up until about 11 AM this morning.

Why 11 this morning? Well, at 11 this morning I found myself in the midst of this seething throng of humanity…wpid-20150404_114802.jpg

… and if you know my thoughts about holidays in general, it should come as no shock at all that I really don’t much care at all for being around crowds like this. People are at their worst in crowds. That herd mentality sets in, and all of a sudden you don’t have individuals making clear decisions on their own merits, you have a mob in the ragey throes of pack logic.

But today was Easter, and my mother had the great idea to take the sprouts to this big Easter Egg hunt, and, well, there we were. And there were moments — several of them — when I wanted to bail, to take my kids and get as far from this manufactured mass of pastels and candy as possible. But we went through with it.

And you know what?

The kids had a great time, and that’s all that fargoing mattered. Who cares if their grumpy dad was uncomfortable with the crowds, if he was inwardly sneering at all the colors and smiling faces? Who cares that the parking was a nightmare, or that my son wimped out on the bouncy slide we waited five minutes to get him on, or that the sno-cone we bought him cost two freaking dollars? (TWO DOLLARS. FOR ICE AND SUGAR WATER. It still hurts me.) He came back talking about doing more Easter hunts, and his face was illuminated with the joyous glow that I can only dream of having in my own cranky old disillusioned soul. I will never in my life feel the joy that permeated his being and exploded from his every pore at the simple happiness of the balloon handed to him at the tent operated by the local Plumbing group, except for the joy I can feel vicariously through him. I even grinned at the simple but pure greed of sprout #2, who was too young to know what was going on, but not too young to go back for one taste after another of the delicious purple ice I offered to her.

This is my wife’s fault. She’s known all along that there was more to these occasions than I ever allowed myself to believe, and she staunchly held her ground against my protestations that we shouldn’t bother celebrating any of them all these years. As is so often the case, she gets to have the last laugh now.

wpid-20150404_114823.jpg

It was a day I should’ve hated, but it was the best Easter I’ve ever had. And there must be something seriously wrong with me, because I’m thinking it wouldn’t be a terrible idea to do it again next year.

This post is part of Stream of Consciousness Saturday.