Tag: toddler life

Don’t Forget to Wash Up

PavowskiLeave a comment

This is the kind of thing that you find all over your previously perfectly boring, perfectly un-terrifying house when you become a parent.

Kids don’t give a hot handful how a toy is meant to be played with. They’re going to play with it in the way that makes the most sense to them at the time, dammit, and if that means dumping six 300-piece puzzles out on the floor and mixing the pieces together so that those puzzles will never be completed in this life or the next, that’s what they’re going to do. If it means running Hot Wheels tracks all over the house and the couch and the cat sleeping on the couch, that’s what they’re bloody well going to do. And if it means decapitating their action figures and not so much tossing but posing the disembodied heads in the sink drains so that it looks like little blue gremlins are slithering out of the unseen depths to haunt my nightmares, then that’s what they’re absolutely going to do, thank you very much.

Never mind that I’m going to stumble on this disturbing tableau first thing in the morning. My sleep-addled brain is going to have to contend with a miniature demon head peeking out of the drain. (It won’t contend well. I’ll first have a lizard-brain fight-or-flight jump accompanied by a quite unmanly yelp, followed by some hyperventilating and finishing off by jumping at shadows for the rest of the day.) Never mind that the petit horror is waiting for me in a safe space within a safe space to thoroughly throw off my sense of routine. (Nobody expects to get their brains scared out first thing in the morning in the bathroom, for goodness’s sake … but if it is going to happen in the bathroom, I expect the terror to come from the shower, as would any red-blooded horror movie fan, so the sink is just out of bounds. I’d at least be gratified if the kids had set a trap for me in the shower.) No, the scare will come, not from the last place I’d expect, but from a place that it wouldn’t even occur to me to ever consider that it might come from.

I’ll table, for now, the question of whether leaving a disembodied head in a sink means my kid is a serial killer in the making, and instead focus my mental efforts on checking the toaster for silly string and my kids’ artwork for surreal nightmare imagery culled from my dreams.

The Trooth Fairy

PavowskiLeave a comment

I’m a bad parent, I realize, as I slow-pedal up to the front of the house. It’s 5:30 AM, I’m just getting back from my run, and I can see through the blinds on my son’s window that he’s awake and bouncing around in his bed. (Literally. He’s six. Settle down.)

My first thought is, “why is he up so early?” Which, as soon as it’s asked, is answered by the second thought: “because he’s checking for his tooth fairy money.” Which I forgot to place under his pillow last night.

Because I’m a bad parent.

I don’t have a great excuse, and I’m no fan of excuses anyway. It just wasn’t a priority. So somewhere between Masterchef (which I watch too much and hate every minute of) and a couple dozen pre-sleep pages of How I Killed Pluto (and Why It Had It Coming), it slipped through the cracks in the ol’ memory box. Which is kind of terrible, because this tooth has been falling out for about two weeks. First, it was just loose. Then it was really loose. And for the past week or so, it’s literally been hanging on by a thread. (I know, it makes me queasy just to think about it, much less to write about.) Seriously, it could spin in its socket like a stripped-out screw in drywall. (My further apologies.) Its loss is an event, awaited with the same kind of impatience that accompanies the weeks leading up to college football starting up.

Yesterday, it finally fell out.

Sprout tried to pull a fast one on my wife and I.  He told me, when he got home, that he “lost it”, and when I asked him what that meant, he said it was either on the road somewhere (my first clue — he’s such a little sack of nerves that he won’t go anywhere near the road out of somebody’s supervision) or that he swallowed it. My wife gave me her unimpressed face and said, “oh, you mean it’s not in the bag your teacher told me about?” And then he went running to his room to get it.

He had come straight in the door and put his newly unmoored tooth directly under his pillow.

I remember reading a story recently about somebody whose kid ran a science experiment on this whole “tooth fairy” business. Said kid lost a tooth — one of the back ones, one that’s not readily within notice (whereas my poor kid basically has a bay window in the front of his mouth now thanks to losing both of his front-top chompers). Said kid suspected that the tooth fairy had something to do with her parents, so without telling her parents, she hid the tooth under her pillow.

Three mornings later, short of cash and still in possession of a dried-out tooth, she presented her findings to her parents, I imagine buttoning her Ted Talk with a petulant “this is all bullshit, isn’t it?”

So, I thought of that, and my heart leapt for a second. Maybe my son was trying to test the existence of the tooth fairy. Maybe he’s a secret scientific genius. Maybe this is the beginning of his skeptical awakening.

But no, I’ve watched enough TV to know better. Follow the money. He was trying to get paid, preferably as soon as possible so that he could get some dollar-store candy, thank you very much.

But, as I said — here I am the next morning, and I’ve forgotten.

And he’s already up. And the only reason he’d be up early on a school day is because he’s excited about something, and that something is the fat stack of cash he’s anticipating for his missing tooth. So he’s seen that his tooth is still there, still in its wrinkled plastic baggy, dried blood flaking of the craggy underside. His little heart will be broken. A little bit of magic will have gone out of the world.

And because I’m an evergreen Scrooge, my heart brightens a little bit at that thought. Well, this is as good an opportunity as any to tell him the whole thing is a sham, the miser in my head says. He was gonna learn sooner or later, so why not now? First, kick this tooth fairy business out the front door — with great prejudice, I might add. Next on the hit list: Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. It’s gonna be a good year.

These thoughts I share with my wife as I’m climbing into the shower. “Might as well tell him,” I say. “We already blew it, so we ought to just send the hard lesson now.” She gives me the unimpressed look, so I stop telling her the things I’m thinking out loud and resolve to have The Talk with my kid once I’m clean.

But I won’t get the chance, as you might have guessed when she was giving me the unimpressed look. Sure enough, I’m mid towel-off when my son bursts in the door with a fistful of dollars. (That’s the funny thing about having young kids. They don’t care about bathroom doors. They’ll come right in. And then stare at you. Nothing weird about that.)

Cue the following exchange:

Sprout: “DADDY LOOK.”

Me: “Oh, you got some money, huh?”

Sprout: “YEAH. I woke up and the tooth fairy forgot to pick up my tooth, but then I went to the bathroom and when I came back, SHE GOT IT.”

Me: “Oh, wow. That’s awesome, buddy.”

Sprout: “Yeah. And daddy, guess what?”

(I often wonder if he actually thinks my name is “daddy guess what”.)

Me: “What?”

Sprout: “She gave me EXTRA dollars this time. LOOK.”

Me: “Super cool.” I look past him to my wife, who leans on the door frame, giving me the unimpressed look again. “I guess she felt bad about not getting it on time, huh?”

Sprout: “Yeah, I guess so. Can I buy some CANDY PLEASE?”

So, as usual, my wife saves the day. Because the other thing I forgot while planning the shattering of my son’s illusions? He’s six, and he’s happy to believe just about anything when plied with toys and candy. The tooth fairy doesn’t fail to exist just because she didn’t show up at the appointed time. She was just running late this morning.

I guess I’ll have to break the tooth to him some other time.

20180913_172244.jpg

The truth, I mean.

(I’m so, so sorry.)

I Am Not The Target Audience

Pavowski3 Comments

We were watching The Little Mermaid today with my youngest (she’s four, now, and has a serious thing for mermenaids, as she calls them — which is, actually, maybe, the best possible version of a non-gendered title for the things?).

Watching it as an adult is not at all like watching it as a kid. It’s hard to imagine a less sympathetic protagonist — literally all she does is run around behind her (single) father’s back and disobey his orders and requests (all of which are not only reasonable, but pretty darn sensible at that).

  • She spends her days stalking and obsessing over humans — amassing a room full of their junk. This is creepy.
  • She blows off a major family (and community!) event — “the pinnacle of [Sebastian’s] career” — because she “forgot”. (By the way, and this is particularly irksoe as a guy who knows a thing or two about performances myself, how in the hockeysticks did that performance even begin when they didn’t know where Ariel was? It ain’t like she told somebody “brb, gotta fix my seashells, I’ll make my cue” — they just straight started the show and then were SHOCKED when she wasn’t there. Nonsense!)
  • She runs away from home to make a deal with basically a drug dealer, essentially signing her life over in exchange for a chance at love. Crikey.
  • She busts up a wedding with the help of her band of ragamuffins. (Okay, it was a sham wedding but still.)
  • She leaves her father and family behind to marry a guy who was basically ready to propose after just two or three days (Disney seems to have a fixation with this happening actually)

The only way she works as a protag for me these days is if you accept that the entire plot of the piece is about her naivete — but then that doesn’t work either because she doesn’t learn to not be naive in the end. Quite the contrary — daddy swoops in at the end and fixes everything, giving her exactly what she wanted without for a moment suggesting she, I dunno, maybe think about her actions and their consequences for half a second?

Frustrating. I guess I shouldn’t be watching kids’ movies so closely.

Meanwhile, Sprout the first was in and out of the room, too. Since questions literally come out of his mouth ten-to-one with actual statements, I take great pleasure in messing with him when I can, and watching him mull over whether I’m telling the truth.

“Daddy, what’s that mermaid’s name?”

Fishbooty.

“Daddy, what’s the crab’s name?”

Dippin’ Sauce.

“Daddy, are mermaids real?”

Probably not.

“Are they just rare?”

Very rare.

“How rare?”

Rarer than unicorns.

“Are unicorns real?”

Probably not.

“Dad, what does ‘probably’ mean?”

Just watch the movie.

Problem is, the more he thinks, the more questions he asks. Which, I’ll grant, is a good thing. But an exhausting one.

Toddler Life, Chapter 773: Disposable Income

PavowskiLeave a comment

In case you were wondering, here’s what it takes to (in no particular order):

  • cause a truly diabolical racket when I hit the wrong light switch at 5:30 in the morning
  • cause a cardiac event in a thirty-something dad upon the aforementioned racket
  • immediately disable a newish appliance that was perfectly functional five seconds ago
  • induce stress sweats on and off throughout the day in the same dad at the thought of having to repair, rewire, and/or replace said appliance
  • cause same dad to invent previously unconceived-of words to approximate his thoughts on the matter at large

yep, to cause all that, and a fair bit of heartburn in mom besides, it takes fifty-eight cents.

20180321_170557.jpg

You probably didn’t know such a wide array of “benefits” could be had for such dirt-cheap prices. I certainly didn’t. But that’s only because as a more-or-less reasonable human, I never thought of using a garbage disposal to dispose of unwanted coin.

This is just one ignorance your young children will be only too happy to cure you of. (I know, I know. Don’t end with a preposition. What’s the old joke? “Fine … only too happy to cure you of, A-HOLE?”)

Coins actually fit rather nicely into a garbage disposal, as it turns out. The aural experience, though, is where it gets really exciting. They make a delightful little plinking sound as they slide down the drain. They make a sound like the end of the universe when you turn the disposal on. And then dad makes sounds like he’s dying as he fishes them out again, withdrawing his hands again and again crusted with gelatinous, vomit-inducing food waste.

Luckily, this problem, like so many household problems, is solved with a few minutes on Google and a willingness to get really unspeakably dirty. (I don’t even want to look at my hands, even hours later, for fear I’ll actually be able to see the microbes. Hand soap is great for the stuff that lives in the light, but for the gunk down in the drain, lurking in the pipes… antibacterial is not enough.)

So there’s that.

I found myself almost asking “who did this,” but when you’re a parent and you find yourself asking questions like “who put a handful of coins in the garbage disposal” or “who smeared cake frosting on the dog” or “who stacked every Lego in the house on my pillow”, you’ve already lost the fight. You just fix it and move on, lest you risk losing your mind listening to the denials.

Sidenote: Not sure how long I can continue to call this series “Toddler Life” with a straight face, given sprout #1 is six and sprout #2 will soon be four. But I am certain the series will continue, no matter the name.

 

Toddler Life, Chapter 329: Washing Machines Are Surprisingly Effective at Destroying Books

Pavowski2 Comments

You’re a dad. You’re forgetful. It’s only natural. Your spawn deprives you of years’ worth of sleep with their abject refusal to recognize and observe an reasonable bedtime. Dehumanizes you through endless cleaning of their bodily fluids. Abuses you with an interminable barrage of questions and demands and gibberish statements. If you didn’t love them, it could reasonably be called torture.

So you can be cut some slack when you forget what day it is, or fail to turn in that permission slip, or leave the extra change of clothes at home. And it’s probably no big deal if you don’t notice things that the sharper members of the species might pick up on: the expired milk lurking in the back of the fridge, the due date for your next oil change, the fact that your kids’ clothes don’t match. You’re a dad. You’ve got a lot going on. I feel you.

But I also have you beat.

Through absolutely no fault of my own*, I put my daughter’s favorite book through the washing machine the other day.

In a fit of cleaning house, I spirited the laundry basket downstairs, dumped it in the machine, and shuffled back upstairs to lay down in the bed for thirty seconds pretending I’m the sort of guy who can lay down for a nap in the middle of a Saturday.

Have you ever done that? You haven’t, because even if you’re a sleep-deprived, tantrum-weary guy like me, you at least know to check what’s in the laundry hamper before you dump it in the wash.

Not me.

Advance the tape an hour.

Wife: Hey, did you mean to put a book through the laundry?

Me: What? I didn’t put a book through the laundry.

Wife: Yeah, you did.

Me: I’m sure I wouldn’t.

Wife: Well, I didn’t do it. Did you put this load of clothes in?

She holds up a wad of laundry. It looks like a toddler’s papier-mache project, if the toddler chewed up the papier-mache and spit it out again before starting to sculpt it.

Me: (thinking long and hard about what I could possibly say that isn’t “yes” because I obviously did) (replaying dumping the laundry into the washing machine in my head) (seeming to recall that there may have been a “clunk” that I didn’t bother to investigate) (recalling watching my daughter drop the book into the laundry basket earlier in the day and not doing anything about it right then because for god’s sake, it’s Saturday and I just can’t) …yeah.

Wife: (nodding in a way that’s not entirely sympathetic) …So.

Me: (nodding for lack of anything useful to say) …yep.

Wife: You know that’s her favorite book, right?

Me: I did not know that.

Wife: Uh-huh.

Me: In my defense —

Wife: No.

Me: Sorry?

Wife: You’re about to say, “in my defense, what’s a book doing in the laundry basket?”

Me: Yeah, obviously.

Wife: So it’s the book’s fault?

Me: …Kind of?

Wife: Just clean it up.

When a book gets wet, it goes all soggy and wobbly and wavy as the pages try to expand but can’t, really, as they get in each other’s way. Then when it dries out, it stays kind of wobbly and wavy and, strangely, brittle, forever bearing the mark of whatever negligence caused it to become wet in the first place.

When a book goes through the washing machine, it basically explodes. Half the book — the bit nearest the binding, including much (but not all) of the cover — was intact and in soggy-book state. The rest of it looked like it had been shredded for confetti and fired out of a high pressure cannon into the washing machine at close range. Bits of pulpy paper were stuck to the inside of the basin. The clothes were saturated with the stuff, soggy paper gluing the load of clothes together like a giant, nasty hairball. Fragments of the illustrations glared at me with disembodied eyes and wings and feet. (How they stared with wings and feet isn’t my problem — I felt thoroughly glared at. Though that may have just been my wife.)

Point is, dads, we have it rough. We catch a lot of blame for things that aren’t our fault.

But at least you didn’t wash your daughter’s favorite book.

*may have been entirely my fault