Tag: parenting

Quantum Entangled Toddlers

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There’s a positive feedback loop with staggering implications building in our house.

The kids sense each other.  They pretend to ignore each other, but they’re keenly aware of each other.  Like two quantum-entangled photons carving a helix around one another as they rocket through the cosmos, each sprout picking up the psychic vibrations that the other gives off.

In a lot of ways it’s cool.  Big brother will watch little sister, mimicking her faces and giving her little coos and pokes and kisses.  It’s adorable, really.  He’ll even, properly motivated, allow her to sit in his lap on the couch and snuggle with her like a mother wolf coiling around her cub.  And she, of course, is entranced and enchanted with the idea of another human in the house who’s within a foot of her size.  She watches him with the steely eyes of a hawk tracking a mouse through tall grass from hundreds of feet up, flailing her marshmallow arms and kicking her lizard-skin feet like she’s riding a tiny invisible bike.  It’s enough entertainment to watch for hours, if only it would last that long.

Phase 1 -- distract the adults by looking adorable and harmless.
Phase 1 — distract the adults by looking adorable and harmless.

But it doesn’t.  Not even close.

No, they can feed off one another’s positive energy only so far until one of them will shed an electron, causing the happiness in the system to shift out of phase and become unstable.  From instability it’s only a matter of time — and not much time, at that — until the entire system collapses and one of them starts crying.  Usually, it’s the infant.  Her clementine-sized brain just isn’t capable of holding on to an emotion for longer than a few minutes, and when she doesn’t know what to feel, that’s when the tears come.

Now, big brother can deal with her crying.  He can deal with her screaming.  It doesn’t upset him in any appreciable way.  What he has a problem with is not being the loudest thing in the room.  She’s bawling in terror and apprehension because she suddenly realizes that she doesn’t actually have her mother in her line of vision, and he’s howling gleefully in answer because he’s two and a half and making noise with his mouth is one of his favorite things.

Before you ask, mom and dad are sitting exhausted on the couch, because we, too, can endure the noise to a point.  There’s a threshold of upset noise from the kids below which it simply isn’t energy-effective to respond.  We can’t be hauling ourselves up to see to the sprouts’ every need every two or three minutes, we’d be crazy people.  (Just look at our parents — we are each the oldest of 4.  How they ever managed having four children in the house at one time and not getting carted off to the asylum is a feat which astounds me more every day I pass with our two bundles of joy.)

The noise builds.  If left unchecked, the binary star system will collapse entirely; the infant’s screams becoming more plaintive and actually reaching out to rattle the flesh of our adult eardrums, the toddler, feeding on her unrest, beginning to scream in earnest, upset perhaps because he hasn’t been stopped yet or because he’s afraid that if he stops making noise the Silence will descend forever.  Seriously, I think the boy is terrified of quiet.  If he’s not shouting or babbling or singing as he stomps, runs and crashes around the house, he’s smashing toys/cups/tiny-things-he-should-never-have-gotten-ahold-of into other toys/other cups/tabletops/daddy’s head.  They get louder and louder, the binary stars spiraling faster and more violently around one another until we scoop them up and take them into opposite rooms, thus saving the universe from obliteration and our inner ears from violent decompression.

And they wake each other up.

Sprout #1’s bedtime routine is so finicky, he launched into a bloodcurdling tirade the other night when I tried to bring the wrong blanket into the room.  I wasn’t even going to cover him with it.  It was for ME, and he would not abide its presence in the room.  After his four bedtime stories and four bedtime songs, we leave and he goes into the five stages of grief, coming to rest about eleven minutes later, usually, passed out like a raggedy drunk clutching a Winnie the Pooh plush figurine in his tiny hand instead of a 40.  Meanwhile, Sprout #2 goes to sleep across the hall.  Her routine is simpler if no less demanding — she merely has to suck at the fountain called Mommy for anywhere from seventeen to forty-seven minutes before she goes into a milk coma.

The next ten minutes are critical.  The walls in our house were, let’s say, not designed with kids in mind.  There is no aural insulation.  Every sound carries and the floors upstairs creak like the rusty hinge on the barn in an old horror movie.  Step wrong exiting Sprout #2’s room and Sprout #1 will hear it and start his five stages all over again, adding another stage — blind, frantic screaming — at the beginning of the chain.  This screaming fit will wake Sprout #2 and then the whole cycle must begin again.  Alternatively, if, say, Daddy, after putting his pajamas on upon leaving Sprout #1’s room, finds that he’s for example left his phone upstairs and goes to retrieve it, Sprout #1 is about 80% likely to hear Daddy creeping past his room for up to an hour after bedtime and here come the five stages again, except now it’s more like seven stages and they all sound like I’ve told him Santa Claus is not real and popsicles are actually made of vegetables.

Then, there’s the early morning.  Sprout #2 wakes up anytime from 5AM to 6AM needing more Mommy Fountain, and apparently Sprout #1 sleeps like a secret agent being pursued by the intelligentsia of five different countries, because he wakes up and flies into action at the drop of a hat: banging on the door, howling to be let out, babbling in terror of the scary bugs.  Of course after more than a few hours of sleep there is no consoling him back into dreamland, so 5AM is just when he gets up these days, which means 5AM is just when I get up these days, because there is no sleep for anybody while Mom is with the infant and the toddler is screaming to wake the dead.

Is it any wonder that my wife and I have never felt more exhausted in our lives?  She’s a stay-at-home mom these days, and I work at the school then come home, and we get a scant hour to ourselves after the kids sack out to look at each other and wearily lament the loss of the days when we could, I don’t know, function like actual human beings in a world where said human beings are not held hostage to the whims of tiny despots.

But we love our kids.  Really, we do.  They are miraculous and wondrous and inspiring and incredible and they bring to our lives joy beyond words.

 

Help.

My Wife, the Overachiever

Pavowski1 Comment

There is something wrong with my wife.

She’s incredibly intelligent, incredibly patient with our kids, and incredibly talented at putting up with my particular brand of daily nonsense and idiocy.  I frankly don’t know how she does it.  In addition to being a stay-at-home mom and an occasional on-call news writer, she’s in her third year of a Master’s program.  I’ve seen her daily planner and it gives me the spins.

I should point out that this is not me sucking up.  She gave me explicit permission to write about this, though perhaps not to write about it in the way I’m going to write about it.

It’s a not insignificant feather in her cap that throughout this Master’s program she’s maintained straight A’s.  It’s doubly not insignificant in that her program is a program really designed for teachers and sort of assumes she has ready access to the resources of a school, which she does not.  It’s triply not insignificant in that she’s doing the overwhelming majority of the work from home, which means she spends hours daily reading textbooks thick and dense enough to lay a foundation with and then posting responses and building portfolios and collaborating online with her slacker classmates and just generally making me feel like a schlub for putting in my workday at school and coming home too exhausted to do much more than make dinner and sack out.  Add to that the fact that the sprout only wants her to put him to bed anymore and that every other hour she’s either got an infant or a breast pump attached to her chest and, well, I am starting to wonder if she hasn’t in fact been bitten by a kryptonite spider (that’s a thing, right?).

I think we’re both gifted with more than our share of innate intelligence, my wife and I.  The key difference between my wife and I is that she takes her natural ability and slides into the driver’s seat, finding ways to make the best of herself and challenge herself in even the smallest of projects, while I, um, well, I like video games and writing blarg posts about the inconsequential minutiae of my life.   Oh, and I locked OUR ENTIRE FAMILY out of the house not two weeks ago.  She gets straight A’s in her graduate program, and I routinely load the dishwasher and forget to run it, then get mad at the dishes for being dirty in the morning.

Anyway, she’s home with the sprouts today, studying up on educational practices for exceptional education while breastfeeding the infant and keeping the toddler from killing himself in any of the dozen ways that the house presents him with, and she has to take a quiz for her online course.  Well, the instructor called it a quiz, but it was an eighty question marathon that ended up taking her two hours to complete.  I’m going to leave aside the issue of the instructor giving a non-retake-able “quiz” at eighty questions (seriously, who has that kind of time?).  She gets about halfway through the thing and the sprouts start to wake up from their naps and she has to finish the quiz while they’re screaming and slurping at her and throwing things around the living room and making her life unbearable.

She got an eighty-five.

Now, here’s the difference between my wife and me.  If it’s me taking this quiz, and I got an eighty-five in a vacuum, I’m pleased as my dog when we leave the room and our dinner plates are still on the table.  If I got an eighty-five with the sprouts bouncing off the walls and pulling and tugging at me and screaming and I’m in pain from my body producing ungodly amounts of infant food, I expect nothing short of a ticker-tape parade complete with elephants playing trumpets and midget monkeys building a walking humanoid Eiffel Tower.  My wife gets the eighty-five, and she is furious.  I’m talking about there has been no happiness in her life since it happened.  She’s mad as hell that the quiz was misrepresented and she was unable to properly budget her time for it, and she’s concerned because her post-graduate GPA of 4.0 could conceivably be in jeopardy thanks to this one quiz.

She might as well be French-Canadian for all the sense this makes to me.  Don’t get me wrong, I can appreciate a perfect record as much as the next guy, but I will also be the first to point out that the piece of paper you get at the end of a graduate program like this is the same if you squeak by as if you pass with flying colors.  Which is not to say I advocate mediocrity or not living up to your potential; rather, I maintain that you should do your best under the circumstances you exist in and not burn yourself out like the human candle trying to achieve perfection in every aspect of your life.  (In writing that, I feel suddenly as if I’ve outed myself as one of those slackers for whom, as a teacher, I would probably have a few choice words.)

How does she do it?  How can a person chase perfection in so many aspects of her life, and perhaps more puzzlingly, how does such a person end up with a slackerjack like me?  And finally and perhaps most importantly, will she murder me where I sit for giving her a hard time about it in front of my tiny internet audience?

Stream of Consciousness Saturday: Sprout Shenanigans

Pavowski7 Comments

Of course he’s awake.  I mean, why wouldn’t he be?  It’s only 5:30 in the morning.  The sun won’t be up for another hour.  His baby sister will be awake in about fifteen minutes, but after a light snack, she at least will go back to dreamland for another two hours or so.  But no, he’s awake.  Which means I have to be awake, because today is my day to get up early with the kids.

Make no mistake, the mind of a child is a lot more powerful than we give them credit for.

On some level, he knows that I agreed to get up for the early shift with the kids so that my wife could have one blessed day of sleeping in.  He knows that we had a drink or two last night and got to bed later than usual.  He knows that I want nothing more than to turn off their monitors and let them cry it out until they fall asleep again, or until I wake up of my own accord.  But I won’t do that, because I’m dad.

They work together in ways you couldn’t imagine, these kids of mine.  Sure, Sprout #2 pretends to be completely defenseless and powerless to do anything and completely dependent upon my wife and I (okay, completely dependent on my wife), but I swear she’s communicating with Sprout #1, who is developing a kind of literary and oratory prowess that unnerves me a little.  Just the other day, he was playing with his toys and without any prompting, warning, or cue, turned to my wife and quoted with authority the entirety of page 37 of Dr. Seuss’s Green Eggs and Ham: “Would you like them in a car?  // I would not, could not, in a car!”  Confession time, that may not be page 37 of the book, but the quote is verbatim; I know this because I’ve only read it to him about four hundred times.  See, lately, he’s graduated from “want that” and “no beef stew” to actually using nouns and verbs together in the way they are intended, his tiny little stabs at formal language taking shape like so much silly putty being formed into the likeness of a sticky pink Statue of Liberty.

So I know he’s communicating with Sprout #2.  Covertly, of course.  While my wife and I think he’s just babbling incoherence or yelling for the sheer joy of hearing his not-so-tiny-anymore voice reverberate off the crayon-festooned walls, he’s slipping her messages.  I can only guess at what they are, but they are coordinating over the past several days in ways too numerous to ignore.  For example…

They don’t nap at the same time.  Ever.  The most we get is a fifteen-minute overlap, presumably the result of Sprout #1 falling too fast asleep and forgetting to wake up to hold up his end of the deal.

Sprout #1 will basically start crying whenever she stops.  He’ll find something to get upset about, something to want that he can’t have, something he wants to do that we can’t allow, something to fall off of and hurt himself.  When she’s crying or upset, he’s mostly cool, but as soon as she chills, it’s time for him to go to eleven.  Sprout #2, on the other hand, cries whenever I look in her direction, except when Sprout #1 is throwing a fit, then she falls asleep in a way that benefits us none at all.  Unless they decide to both go into full four-alarm screaming tantrums at the same time.  Then all you can do is sit on the couch and press your fingers into your temples until the world fades away.  Of course, then, Sprout #1 will throw a full bag of crayons at your unguarded privates, and then the whole screamy world comes crashing back into your cranium.

They can both go from being absolutely adorable to being nightmares out of a Stephen King novel in the space of about ten seconds.  All it takes for Sprout #1 to turn is tripping over a toy, or being told he can’t have a popsicle, or his daddy taking a little too long to get him loaded into the car to go to the playground.  Sprout #2, as I mentioned before, can turn on me in the space of a second for no reason I can discern.  I think she just likes to see if she can make me cry by crying at me, in a weird sort of reversal of the “let me imitate the face you’re making” game that kids apparently like so much.

They coordinate farts.  This cannot be made up, and I would not dare to embellish.  Just this morning (shortly after they both woke up prior to 6 AM) we were sat on the couch watching PUPPY SHOW (I’ve no idea what the show is called, LeapFrog something I think, but Sprout #1 calls it PUPPY SHOW so PUPPY SHOW it is), when I felt the tiny little burst on my left thigh where Sprout #2 was sitting.  Not a moment later, a somewhat bigger, juicier, louder brap on my right thigh.  Then a series of staccato fut-fut-futs on my left thigh from the newborn.  Then a deeper, gut-rumbling pfffththththth on the right. Then I’m sitting there, holding the two of them, laughing so hard I’m crying as their symphony of gastrointestinal woodwinds blows away in my lap.

And of course, they don’t let us sleep in.  No, she wakes up at 5:30 or 5:45 like clockwork for her early morning snack, and he’s up and kicking by 6:30, just about the time my wife is falling asleep again after providing the snack for the newborn.  But no, when it’s Daddy’s morning to get up early with the babies, they’re both up at 5:15 and there is no falling back to sleep for them or for Daddy until the sun is out and it’s so hot in the house no adult could sleep for fear of suffocating on his own sweat.

I love my children, I really do.  But I think they’re trying to kill me.  Not cold-blooded murder, you understand.  Just the long, slow, inescapable death of gradual exhaustion by degrees.

 

This post is part of SoCS:

http://lindaghill.wordpress.com/2014/08/22/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-august-2314/

To the Parents of Children Gassed in Ferguson (I Am Not Sympathetic)

Pavowski3 Comments

I’ve said it before, but it is not my intention to go around starting fires using this blog.  I try to speak from a place of my own personal experience and to generalize that experience when it’s appropriate to those unlucky souls who read what I write here with any manner of regularity.

That said, there are some things going on in Ferguson that I do feel comfortable making blanket statements about.

Look, what’s going on there is a tragedy and a travesty.  I’m not here to say that justice has gone haywire or that people are overreacting — it’s a capital “B” Bad Situation there right now no matter how you slice it.  That said, what the situation calls for is NOT people across the country jumping immediately to the blind defense of one side or another.  We simply don’t know all the ins and outs and it’s impossible for us to make a judgment on what should or should not be going on there from one day to the next.  But I do know ONE thing that protesters SHOULDN’T be doing, and that’s involving their kids in the protests.

A thing that’s getting a lot of play today is that apparently some children were on the receiving end of teargas used by the police to disperse one of the protesting groups (I’m being really careful not to use the word “mob”, because, again, I’m not there and I don’t know the situation).  And let’s not split hairs: that’s bad.

But.

The subsequent headlines and outrage and villainization of the police on the back of this unfortunate eventuality is all a fraud.  You can’t be mad at the police in this case and this instance because it is not the police force’s fault the kids got gassed.  You just can’t.  Sorry.  I know the narrative is supposed to be that the police are jumping to violence and becoming downright fascist and impinging on human rights down in Ferguson.  And the truth is, maybe they are.  But that’s immaterial in the case of these kids getting gassed.  No, if you’re a parent in Ferguson and your child got gassed, that is your fault.

“But the police shouldn’t be using teargas to break up peaceful protesters!”

Maybe not.  But they have been.  They did it on the first night of protests and they’d done it again since.  What makes you think it’d be any different this time?

“But those protesters were protesting peacefully!”

Maybe they were.  But those protesters are also fully and acutely aware of just how tense the situation is out there.  They know the cops have (and I really wish there were a better metaphor) itchy trigger fingers.  They knew and they know that it can go down at any moment out there.

“But those were just children!”

Maybe so.  But a mob is a mob (again, I’m not saying it was a mob, but I’m saying that the police are treating it like a mob), and when you’re dealing with a mob, you don’t have the luxury of time to say “oh, this person is physically trying to murder me and that one’s leading a hunger strike; let me direct my limited resources at the one that matters”.

No, the onus for any child getting gassed at any of these protests is strictly on the parents.  As a parent, your job, before anything else, is to provide for the safety of your child.  Your kid should have been at home, watching terrible reruns of cartoons you’ve seen hundreds of times, or — and I know this is pretty far out there — in bed, asleep.  Instead, you brought the kid to a protest.  A protest in a city where over the past week a teenager has died, reporters have been arrested, and teargas and rubber bullets have been unleashed on protesters.

Let’s not forget, either, the lunatic selfishness and self-importance that might cause a parent to bring a child to an event like this.  I understand the compulsion, and perhaps even the fervor that makes you feel like you have to be present, that you have to be a part of what’s happening when your community is in turmoil.  Guess what?  Your first job as a parent is keeping your kid safe; you have to either accept that and sit the protest out or embrace the idea that you’re putting your child in harm’s way for your own ideology.  I might as well bring my kid to an industrial finger-slicing factory for the educational possibilities and be angry when my kid sticks his hand in a machine (as kids are wont to do) and gets his fingers lopped off.  It’s not the machine’s fault that YOU put your kid in a dangerous situation.  The machine is just doing what it does.  The police in Ferguson are just doing what they’ve done since this whole mess started.  I’m not saying it’s right; it’s not for me to decide what’s right.  But they’ve been using teargas and rubber bullets since the first night, and you brought your kid to the protest?  You should be arrested for child endangerment.

The righteous indignation over kids being the newest victims of police brutality in Ferguson is as empty as the sympathy-pit in my cold, dead heart for these idiots putting their kids in harm’s way.  News outlets posting that “violence in Ferguson has turned against children” or “children are the latest victims of police aggression” should be ashamed of themselves.  Parents raising hell and boo-hooing and calling for the officers in question to be killed or arrested can likewise go take a hike.  The police are not knowingly firing on children.  They’re firing on a “mob.”  Let’s say you have a delicious piece of cake.  It’s glorious and has just the right amount of buttercream frosting and the cake mix is just delectable; it’s so perfect that no man living could say a cross word against the cake.  You stick the cake into a brown paper bag, light the bag on fire, and ring my doorbell.  I open the door, see a burning bag, and proceed to stomp it into oblivion to extinguish the flame, ruining a perfectly good piece of cake in the process.  You don’t get to paint me as a cake-hater.  The only way you get to say the police are targeting kids is if the police broke into your house where your child was sleeping and gassed him in his bed.

And if the cops did see the kids in the crowd?  Sorry, you still don’t get to villainize them, because now you’re hiding behind the defenseless to deter the threat of violence, which is the most cowardly of cowardly war acts.

Oh, and if you did bring your kids to the protest in the hopes that you would gain more notice for yourself or your cause by involving the kids, shame on you.  Kids don’t have an agenda; kids don’t have the capacity for that stuff.  At best they think it’s some intricate field trip, at worst you’re just indoctrinating them.  And, oh yeah, if you got your kid gassed at the protest you just had to be at, you’ve only taught him to hate cops and by extension all authority figures, which I’m sure is NOT AT THE HEART OF ANY OF SOCIETY’S PROBLEMS.

Let me reiterate that I don’t think the cops are right in this.  I don’t think that they’re wrong either.  It’s not my place to make that call, but if they have received death threats and if the crowds are growing unruly, then I understand their position.  By the same token, I don’t think the protesters are right in this, but I don’t think they’re wrong either.  A member of the community is dead and the police seem to be closing ranks, so I understand their position.  What both sides need is a good solid dose of calm-down juice and probably a more forceful authoritarian force coming in from outside to chill the business out.  Maybe the National Guard can help that today.  Either way, for the love of all that’s holy, leave your kids out of this mess.  They don’t deserve to be on the receiving end of violence that you’re helping to perpetuate, no matter what you believe about this situation.

Remote Controlled Lunatic (Or, children make you insane, vol. 271)

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Being a parent means so many little changes in your life.  Big ones, too, naturally, but little ones that don’t even really trip the radar.  There’s the level of ambient noise you perceive as “normal” in your house or the world (increases the longer you have kids).  There’s a general level of cleanliness you’re willing to accept (and which deteriorates over time).  There’s the idea of being awakened in the middle of the night for things short of the house literally being in flames or an actual intruder coming to murder your face (goes from “hardly ever acceptable” to “pretty much planned and expected every night”).  And you’re aware of these things in a detached way but not so much that you actively think about them.

Then there are the things that sneak up on you and which you accept so completely and unquestioningly that it shocks you in retrospect.  For example, I am willing to believe just about anything my wife tells me that I know about or knew about.  She could lie to me and tell me that she explained the meaning of life to me in all its nuanced poetic simplicity over pancakes yesterday, and I would believe it in a heartbeat despite not actually being in possession of said knowledge, and also knowing full well that we did not have pancakes yesterday.  My mind has become a leaky sieve, and I am no longer a good judge of whether or not I have heard something before and whether I told a thing to somebody or whether I remembered to put on pants before the family came over for dinner (spoiler alert: I didn’t, and continued to prep dinner for thirty minutes in my pajamas before my wife pulled me aside to correct the situation).

All that is to say that I no longer trust myself to know what’s actually going on right in front of me, and I will latch like a facehugger onto any explanation which presents itself, whether that explanation is reasonable or not.

Case in point.

I’m driving to work the other morning.  It’s not even a discombobulated, late, running-out-the-door-with-shaving-cream-still-on-my-ear kind of morning.  I woke up, ran, showered, shaved, had breakfast, said goodbye to the wife and kids, and got into the car and drove off.  I even remembered my pants.  I turn on the radio and I’m listening to the prattle of the Bert Show as one of the DJs (is she a DJ if she doesn’t wrangle music?… whatever) professes that she can divine facts about a person’s life just by looking at their wedding registry.  You know, high-brow entertainment.  So I’m driving and not-really-listening when I hear this voice.

It’s a strange voice.  It’s too high and too stilted and the cadence is weird and I can’t make out a word of what it’s saying.  It’s not speaking a foreign language, it’s just speaking at the lower register of what’s audible.  I turn down the radio and it stops.  “Okay,” my brain thinks, “it’s just ambient noise from the studio, maybe somebody forgot to squelch a mic or wandered through the studio gossiping about their weekend.  No worry.”  And on I drive.

Then I hear it again, same weird pitch, same weird cadence, same inaudible volume.  But I hear it more distinctly now.  A voice outside the car?  I’m driving through a neighborhood so it’s possible it could have been a kid shouting.  I buy it until I look in the mirror and see no evidence of any kids waiting on buses anywhere in the vicinity.  I turn the radio off and it stops again.  Fishy.  On I drive.

It’s when I hear the alien voice for a third time that my brain just throws up its hands and says, “Okay, I give up, you’re obviously going insane and hearing voices is just a part of your life now.”  I still can’t make out the words, but the voice is insistent and deliberate under the drone of the radio.  I’ve switched stations so I know it’s not an artifact of the studio.  I’m no longer in a residential area so it can’t be somebody speaking outside the car.    Yet there it is, sounding almost like it’s coming from inside my own head.  Do I have to be concerned about hearing voices?  Does it matter if there’s a sinister voice telling me to kill people if I can’t understand what it’s saying?  Maybe it’s my subconscious whispering to me in German because I somehow subliminally understand German from a past life I had living in feudal Germany?  I turn off the radio to be alone with my thoughts and drive for a solid five minutes under the assumption that this oddball voice is just something I’m going to have to learn to live with.

Then I come up on a red light and stop, and I hear the voice again.  Without the hum of the radio and the whimper of the car’s engine, the voice is suddenly crystal clear, if still muffled and distant sounding in my head.

“Nine!  This is the number, NINE.”  *Boing, boing, boing*

And immediately my mind flashes back in time two months to the time my son brought this horribly annoying Grover “remote control” that talks to you when you push its buttons and how much I hated that toy and how happy I didn’t realize I was when he somehow didn’t have it when we got out of the car; so happy I didn’t bother to think what had happened to it.  Obviously it slipped from his hand and slithered across the cheeto- and cheerio-crusted floor and found its way up under the driver’s seat and wedged itself in amongst the discarded coke cans and the seat’s guide rails and waited, WAITED for me to forget all about it so that it could one day — THIS DAY — begin using the momentum of the car to fling itself against a screw, which would depress the number “9” button, so that it could prattle its inane message that “THIS IS THE NUMBER NINE” into my subconscious under the guise of being radio interference.

Look, the toy is not sentient, okay?  I know that.  I HAVE TO BELIEVE THAT.  This story is not about the toy, it’s about the mind of an adult turning to mush after two years of looking after a tiny human.  It’s about the fact that it seemed — and I am not exaggerating in the least here, though I am wont to do so — more reasonable to me that I had actually gone GIBBERING INSANE on my ride into work than that a perfectly innocuous toy might have been triggered in the backseat and started singing about the number nine.  In other words, simple problem-solving strategies and common sense filters completely failed me in that moment.

Why have they failed me?  Because there is no simple problem solving strategy, and there is no such thing as common sense when you have a toddler.  I found a stuffed animal crammed into one of our living room lamps the other night.  I don’t even know how the kid was able to reach high enough to get the thing in there, or how my wife and I failed to notice it lurking, bright orange and horribly silhouetted, against the lampshade for the weeks it was up there (judging from the healthy layer of dust).  I had to tell my kid not to drink bathwater out of his little pitcher thingy not thirty seconds after he had nearly drowned himself in the tub DRINKING BATHWATER OUT OF THE LITTLE PITCHER THINGY.  The phrase, “You can’t have any smarty-candies because you didn’t make a poop” actually came out of my mouth.  I’ve cleaned MUSTARD off of the TELEVISION.  And that was all just in the last two days.

I don’t want to say that the kid(s) made me crazy.  They didn’t.  They’re only tiny little humans.  What they’ve done is eroded my mind and made me into something like a child again myself.  Higher-level thinking goes out the window when you’re a parent.  You start believing in fantastical, ridiculous sharknado because you forget to care about whether it makes sense or not.

Did I give the impression that all this was a bad thing?  I’m not sure that it is.