Occam’s Razor is a simple scientific precept that I probably misunderstand, but I’m going to hijack it anyway. It states that for any number of given solutions to a problem or any series of explanations for a phenomenon, the simplest one is probably the best one. Did I screw that up? I probably screwed that up. Anyway, toddlers make this almost impossible to do, and with that in mind, I posit a corollary to the Razor: Occam’s Toddler. Occam’s Toddler states that for any number of given solutions to a problem or any series of explanations for a phenomenon, the simplest one is probably the best one; however, if there is a toddler in your charge, it’s dangerous to use razors around toddlers, so put that thing away, and now the toddler is spilling cotton balls and lotion all over the bathroom floor and JESUS GET AWAY FROM THE CURLING IRON —
Ahem. In short, it’s impossible to wield the Razor if you have a toddler. So if you have a toddler, I have a smidge of advice for you:
Throw away that piece of crap you’re holding on to. You know the one. It’s the appliance or tool or bit of furniture that you know is a little bit wobbly, a little bit crappy, a little bit worthless that you’re hanging onto because you can “get by” with it.Read More »
Parenting is a zero-sum game, most of the time. I mean, it’s an upward trend, but that trend is only measurable if you zoom in real close and look at it over a scale of several months. On the day-to-day stuff, you’re lucky to break even. To be more specific:
One day you’re up because the kid takes his first step. Next day you’re down because he blows out a diaper and floods his bed with liquid poop. One day you’re up because the kid says “bye, daddy, I love you”, and the next day you’re down because you’re trying to put the kid to bed and he says “I don’t want daddy, want mommy to read.” One day you’re up because you manage to put the infant to bed by yourself without the help of her mom for the first time literally ever, and then three hours later you’re down again because you’re up (awake) with the infant screaming because you screwed up putting her to bed.
Point is, parenting is hard work: thankless and grueling and pushing you to the limits of your sanity and patience just about every day, and somehow — somehow — you learn to temper the good with the bad. You learn to rein in your elation at a breakthrough because you know the monsters will cut you off at the knees when you least expect it. You learn never to sink into the depths of despair because the little blessings will be lighting up your life again with some adorable bit of cuteness or some flash of brilliance you could never anticipate. In other words, you become very, very adept at taking what you can get when the good stuff rolls along. You become an optimist out of necessity. The alternative is too horrible to ponder.
So you chart your victories and you squeeze all the enjoyment out of them because you know that that joy can be snatched away from you at any moment. The big stuff, you don’t have to worry about. The light goes on for the kid and suddenly he wants to use the potty fifteen times in an hour — you don’t have to milk that victory, that one’s going to burn bright for a while. He suddenly makes the connection that you’re not leaving forever when you leave for work and begins happily waving good-bye in the morning and giving you big squeezing bear hugs when you return… that’s not going anywhere. No, to stay ahead of the curve of frustration because he still wants to grab the dog and yank its fur out, or because he still wants to stack a roomful of toys on top of the sleeping cat, or because he still wants to wake up at 5 AM for some goldfingered reason despite the fact that he gets frustrated that there’s nothing to do at that hour, you have to grab hold of the little victories and suck them dry like a wanderer in the desert sucking the sweat out of his headband.
There are little victories everywhere, if you know where to look for them. But the ones worth the most points are the ones disguised as failures. Case in point: Sprout #1 loves the movie Cars. Loves it so much it’s wrong. He’ll watch it twice in a day if we’re not careful. As a result, he’s memorized bits and pieces of it, and he peppers his primeval dialogue with it, sometimes in an appropriate way, sometimes not so much. There’s one line that he loves toward the beginning of the film: “Lightning’s not going into the pits!” which basically never makes sense outside of the context of the movie, and which I only grasp at vaguely even during the film. That one, then, is essentially harmless. Then, toward the middle of the film, Lightning, voiced by Owen Wilson, is driving on a dirt road, trying to absorb a bit of driving wisdom from another talking car (what else would cars talk about, anyway?), when he realizes that the advice he’s received makes no sense, and he discounts it at once with a brilliantly-inflected “What an idiot!” which the sprout can recreate perfectly, right down to the intonation and the roll of the eyes.
So we’re driving. And it’s Sunday in Greater Atlanta, which to be brief means that the rules of the road are out the window and the only thing you can count on other drivers to do is anything they’re not meant to do (U-turns in the middle of a road, suddenly slipping into reverse at a stop light, stopping on a green light and putting a blinker on to try to cross three lanes of traffic to make the right turn they didn’t realize was coming up, burning the tires out to zoom past you in the turn lane while you’re stopped at a red light) and the tension is mounting in the car and in a moment of great frustration, I finally let fly with an epithet. Now, because I know the sponge is in the backseat soaking up everything I say, I quickly start babbling a lot of nonsense in the hopes that the floodwater of extra information will wash away the profanity like a rushing river. But the boy cuts me off, shouting, a la Owen Wilson, “What an idiot!”
And it’s brilliant and funny and appropriate and all of those things but my wife and I share a mortified look because as brilliant and funny and appropriate as it is, we know that if he can let fly with it in the car, he can let fly with it when he gets to preschool, or he can let fly when he’s playing with some kid on the playground, and that’s a situation none of us want to deal with. So we start to correct him, but then we realize that he’s certainly heard worse, and in fact just heard worse, and my wife whispers to me, “at least he didn’t say ‘fargoing idiot’.” And in my mind, I think, or a goldfingered ratbastard, or a motherless piece of sharknado, or afargoing psychopath, or any of a number of other things I may or may not have said in his presence when I forget for an instant that the kid is there and the real world breaks through and you just have to swear.
I nod. We shrug at each other. It’s a little victory. High-fives all around. “He was an idiot, sprout.” And life is good.
Then we get home and he pours apple juice on the dog.
Picture taken moments before he faceplants and tears his lip open, leaving him with a scar on his face for weeks.
I love my parents. Let’s get that on the table before I start the griping. Not really griping. Good-natured ribbing. I hope they won’t disown me for writing this. Then again, they’re on vacation for a week, so they may not even read this.
Like many thirty-somethings, I’ve got that time in my past when I sort of fell out of touch with my parents for a while. Never estranged or anything like that, but there were times in my twenties when I’d go a month or so without speaking to them. Not even necessarily on purpose. I was just too cool for school. Well, having kids changes all that, and these days it’s rare for me to go more than a few days without speaking to my folks.
Partly it’s because I now sort of appreciate the biological need for a parent to have his nose one hundred percent lodged in the kid’s business, and that’s literal as well as figurative (see this post which is not about giving enemas to a toddler). Partly because frankly my wife and I need a little bit of backup every now and then and the grandparents are the best source of free childcare currently in operation. Partly because all my wife and I have to talk about anymore is the kids, and it takes a blood relative to listen to all that sharknado. But calling my parents particularly has its own set of hassles associated with it. For example, every time I call my parents, I have to call twice.
No, let’s get this right. Every time I call my parents, six or more phone calls are involved.
First, I call my dad, who’s a retired schoolteacher and now works more-or-less full-time as a math tutor, making enough money to make me want to get certified to teach Math instead of English. To put it bluntly, he stays busy and is always driving around, so the odds of picking him up the phone are about as likely as a tornado opening up in my kitchen, the toddler notwithstanding. For some reason, I can never remember those odds before I ring him up, so the call goes through and rings and rings and rings and then I get his voicemail. Well, I’m not leaving him a voicemail (what is it, 2003?), so I hang up and remember that the smart play is calling my mother. (That was call #1, by the way.)
Call #2 is to my mom, who is also an employee in the school system (but not a teacher – she’s a middle school counselor, so, y’know, god help her). There’s something really odd going on with her, though, because she seems to love her job and therefore stays late almost every day, and her phone gets worse service in her building than my phone gets in mine, which is to say, I’ve got a better chance of finding my cats cleaning the kitchen than of reaching my mom at work. Again I connect to voicemail, and again I hang up without leaving a message.
Let’s detour and note that the leaving of a message or lack of the leaving of a message is entirely inconsequential. I could leave a detailed message with cross references and a works cited page, and I’d still get called back to see what the message was about.
Call #3 is from my mom to me. She’s returning my call, but she invariably calls when I’ve got the sprout in the tub or I’m putting the sprout to bed or I’ve got my hands full of raw chicken from dinner preparations or the sprout has hidden my phone inside of a cat. Half the time she leaves a message which I will not check and which therefore throws notifications at my phone for about a week and a half after. Call #4 is me to my mom and this is usually when we finally connect to establish plans for the weekend or give her an update on the toddler’s bowel movements (true story) or whatever other riveting developments have developed at Casa de Pav in the couple of days since we last spoke.
Call #5 is from my dad, usually within the first hour after I’ve spoken to my mother, but sometimes as much as six hours after on the weekend. Just like my mother, he’s unnaturally gifted at ringing me when I’m wrist-deep in infant poop or my fourth load of dishes that day, so I miss this call. Calls #6-9 are exchanged between my dad being on the road from one tutoring gig to the next and me being embroiled in one toddler emergency or another (“Want chocolate milk!” *pours chocolate milk* “Don’t want chocolate milk!” *puts chocolate milk away in the fridge for later* “WANT CHOCOLATE MILK!”) before we finally connect and cover the exact same ground I covered with my mother an hour or six before.
Under no circumstances do my parents communicate with one another in the meantime. I wonder if after 30+ years of marriage they’ve discovered that the secret to success is to simply avoid one another as much as possible. At any rate, I have to have the same conversation with them both, sometimes as quickly one to the next as fifteen minutes.
The latest iteration was not a few hours ago. My parents are going on a cruise (at a ridiculously good price, damn them) and they wanted an update before they left on how the sprout’s doctor’s appointment today went before they shoved off at 5pm. I had a faculty meeting keeping me at school until about that time. Now, my wife had graciously contacted my dad (unbeknowst to me) to let him know that things went pretty much fine while I was at work. Not knowing that, I frantically tried to call first my dad (call #1) and my mom (call #2). Neither picked up, so I figured I missed them and they were well on their way to the Bahamas or whatever. Fifteen minutes later, my dad calls. He’s at some drawing on board trying to win a free cruise and we can barely hear one another, but I give him the highlights and wish him a good trip. Five minutes after that, my mother calls. She’s elsewhere on the same boat trying to win spa giveaways and can’t talk right now (why did you call me?) and can she call me back in ten minutes?
Look, you get the point. And you know, for having the grandparents involved and a part of our kids’ lives, a few extra phone calls are a small price to pay. Mom and dad, I love you. But seriously. Maybe a little communication on your end.
Nope, never mind. I can’t blarg about this. It’s too gross even for me. There’s nothing funny about violating the butthole of a two-year-old with a tiny plastic tube.
Okay, on second thought, maybe there is. Just not perhaps the kind of funny you want.
But there’s definitely nothing funny about the boy walking around with a look on his face like he’s just been told that Popsicles are made out of horses as he squeezes off tiny little duck-quack farts with every step.
…Again, perhaps it’s not the right kind of funny.
Look, there was definitely a scene. There were towels on the floor and a lot of screaming. There was talk of breaking out the puppy housebreaking pads. I can’t remember if it was the boy screaming or my wife or myself, but it was high-pitched and plaintive. I was really concerned about the state of the tub at one point. There may or may not have been comparisons to Georgia red clay and mud-hut bricks.
But it was too gross to write about, so this is me not writing about it.
Day two of editing is underway. Like jumping into a freezing cold pool, it’s not so bad once you actually get in the water. More to come later.
It’s hard to focus with all this poop I’m not writing about.
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.
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.
Welcome. This is my page for sharing projects associated with my coursework in Media and Technology at the University of West Georgia. Assignments will be posted here as they are completed.
Accidentally Inspired 