This weekend we were finally able to make a purchase that we’ve been planning and saving for quite a while: a big screen television.
When we brought it home, the kids’ eyes lit up with delight. We unpacked it, set it up, and the kids began enjoying it right away.
Were they amazed by the clarity? The contrast, the color, the viewing angle?
No.
They found fun where any kid would.
Five or fifteen, they’re all kids. Who cares about the TV, let’s play with the box! Makes me proud.
My kids are infamous for their skills in finding ways to use toys completely wrong. Aside from merely leaving trails of board game pieces in their wake all about the house and setting up “Mouse Trap” just to spring the trap (I don’t think we ever actually played that game), they find ways of using pieces of their games and toys that I’m certain the designers had never imagined.
Michael is the current reigning champion of toy abuse in our house. On any given day, you can find him sending bowling pins, magnetic building pieces, blocks and musical instruments down his Step2 plastic slide. He’ll toss rubber balls into his crawl-through tubes or cram them into empty plastic Easter eggs. Bubble wands become swords to brandish against our aging cat. Toy golf clubs become battle axes to brandish against whichever sister is closest. I recently found horseshoe stakes crammed down inside his wiffle-ball tee and marbles from his block runway set squirreled away to all corners of the house. Wooden sticks intended to serve as musical instruments are regularly discovered jutting out of couch cushions, to be used as levers for some imaginary, demonic machine. Don’t even ask where the legos end up.
I had to hide a little baseball game he has that uses small metal balls. He’s already lost four of them, and when I saw him cramming the remaining four into the couch cushions, I knew if I didn’t act quickly they’d be gone for good.
Are there any children out there who actually play with toys the way they’re meant to be played with? Any who keep the pieces together? Sure, kids are messy and they don’t put things away. But are there any who actually use the game pieces with the intended game? Any who don’t find alternate uses for them?
“He’s being creative! He has a very active imagination!” I hear this a lot. “He’s exploring his world, thinking outside the box!” That’s great. Maybe I should invite these people to come over and put all this creative thinking back into the box so I don’t step on it and lacerate my foot.
If you turned our house upside-down and gave it a good shake, I’m certain you’d see, cascading down in a rainbow-colored plastic hailstorm, every toy piece that’s ever gone missing. And probably Jimmy Hoffa too.
I know I am not alone in this.
But to shell out the big bucks for these whizzy toys that he doesn’t use is an exercise in bad economy.
So I’m thinking next gift-giving occasion, I’m not going to bother with the forty-piece set of educational toy play. I’m just going to get him a clock, a hammer, and a pair of safety glasses.
Thirteen years ago, I stood watching an ultrasound, silently hoping we were looking at a girl baby. I was pleased to see my wish come true as the technician pointed out the important part of the grainy black and white image. This would be my second daughter, affectionately known here as “L”.
When the technician moved on to scan other areas, I happened to notice a dark void that was separate and distinct from the mass that was my child.
“What’s that?” I asked.
The technician hesitated a bit, but went back over that area.
“Hmmm… probably a non-developed fetus,” she said after a couple of passes.
“Like, she could have been a twin?”
“Yes, that’s pretty likely. It happens some times,” she said, flatly.
I couldn’t get that out of my mind. I might have had two more little girls instead of just one. Twins! How cool would that be? But only a few hours after getting a healthy dose of life on the outside of the womb, this little baby’s temperament ripened into one that made me quite happy that she was not a twin.
Fast forward to 2004, past divorce and remarriage and the construction of a new blended family. Herald the arrival of Michael.
Right away, my wife and I noticed something about him: he has like a miniature version of his sister L. Her twin had returned in the form of a red-haired boy.
Now, all kids exhibit some common bizarre behaviors. All four of ours have painted with toothpaste, crammed something down a heater vent, spilled countless glasses of milk/water/juice/soda, and stuck something up their noses.
But L and Michael share characteristics that go beyond typical kid stuff. Let me itemize.
I’m sure it would not surprise you to know that their birthdays are separated by just under two weeks.
Since he was six months old we have referred to Michael as “L’s Twin,” which had annoyed L to no end… until fairly recently. After Michael picked a toy off the floor with his foot and put it back on the shelf, as she herself has been known to do, she shook her head, smiling, and admitted “I guess he really is my twin.”
I’m glad she’s finally accepted the truth. It makes things so much easier.
Michael has added another merit badge to his young life.
He has suffered a very hard lesson in natural consequences.
Many months ago, a squishy rubber ball containing fake worms was purchased for Michael on a whim. It was hanging out in the aisle at a grocery store. An impulse purchase, tactically placed to attract the attention of any child who happened along, in the hopes that said child’s worn and weary parent will give in and buy it. The tactic worked; I don’t even recall which one of us bought it for him.
But he loved this little ball. He loved grossing out his mom with it. He’d just give it a good squeeze, and life-like little faux earthworms would squirm around inside. His mom would invariably recoil in horror.
He liked to sniff it. I guess it was the scent of neoprene that intrigued him, I don’t know. Actually, he likes to sniff stuff in general. But that’s a whole other topic of conversation.
He liked to toss it down the stairs, cram it into the couch, throw it into his climbing tubes, wrap it in his blanket and keep it on the table where he could see it during dinner.
Yes, life was good with the squishy, worm-filled rubber ball.
Like most boys his age, he was, on occasion, careless with it. He could be found writing on it with a pen, jabbing at it with a splinter of wood, exploring it with a paper clip, or poking his fingers through some of the outer orifices to get a better grip on it. And of course some times he’d squeeze it as hard as he could, to see just how much the membrane would stretch.
And we’d warn him not to do those things:
“Be careful, Michael! If you don’t take care of it, it will break. And if it breaks, we’ll have to throw it away. Then you won’t have it any more.”
“It won’t break!” he’d say, after successfully completing some campaign of injury to it, and showing us that it was unscathed.
Then yesterday afternoon, it happened.
It was a typical weekend afternoon. Mommy was at work (nurses have the most unfortunate schedules), sister was ostensibly watching Michael (which means she was fully absorbed in the movie she wanted to watch, and was hoping Michael was interested in it too), and daddy was getting dinner going.
Without warning or buildup, Michael burst into tears.
I dropped what I was doing to see what was the matter.
“Michael! What is it?”
“I wuzza muzza inna zo iss ho!” I could not make out a word of what he was saying, through his expression of utter sorrow.
“What?”
“MAH WUMMY BADDA HO WASSA NO WORK!”
“I can’t understand you. You have to calm down.”
But he didn’t. Instead, he escalated his upset, and wailed. He bawled like I’ve rarely seen him bawl.
He indicated something in the laundry room.
“HOLE DOESN’T WORK!” he said. I assumed he meant something about the cat door. She rarely uses it, so I could understand how he’d be concerned that it doesn’t work. The cat probably thinks it doesn’t work.
But he wouldn’t be so upset about that. I knew he was tired; he’d had a long day, it was hot, he never took a nap, and he was acting emotional beforehand. But this was way over the top.
He continued to wail and cry bitter tears.
“Michael, I can’t help you if I don’t know what’s going wrong. You need to go to your room until you can calm down.”
He didn’t resist me when I took him upstairs, but he continued to cry horribly.
My wife called at just that moment; I told my stepdaughter to answer the phone because I couldn’t at the moment.
I put Michael in his bed and told him to try to calm down and maybe get some sleep, and then I headed back downstairs.
After ten minutes of silence, I went back up to check on him.
He was still awake, a shuddering lump under his blankets.
“Are you ready to tell me what’s wrong?”
“My wormy ball! I bit a hole into it and now I threw it away!”
The poor guy. He’d finally crossed over the line, and had damaged the ball beyond hope.
It was gone.
“I’m really sorry you did that, Michael. Very sorry. But this is why your mommy and I tell you to take care of your things.”
“You have to buy another one!” he said, his breath hitching.
“We can’t. They don’t have them any more.”
And with that, his crying started again in earnest. His raw emotion for this beloved toy was truly heartbreaking to witness. I knew he hurt, and I knew he’d just have to go through this hurt, like so many more he’ll have to simply live through later on in his life. There would be no quick fix, no salve for this wound. It killed me to know what he must be feeling.
I picked him up and held him for a few minutes, and in a rare case of need for just that, he let me. I did my best to soothe my little boy, and he calmed down. I said he could come down stairs, but he wanted to stay in his room, so I left him alone.
I called his mom back and told her the story. When she came home, she cuddled him and comforted him in his loss, but reconfirmed what I’d said about taking care of things, and that sometimes you lose things forever.
My little boy grew up a little yesterday.
I hope maybe this lesson stays with him.
Some times, as a dad, it feels like you have the weight of the world on your shoulders. You put in your day at work, and come home to your evening job as a parent: mediator of fights, bringer of discipline, part time chef, back massager, retriever of medications, bill payer, science project mentor, valet, tooth-brusher, bed-putter and question answerer. You care for everyone in your family first, making sure their needs are met and that the home is set up to keep things going another day.
So after Michael’s in bed and it’s officially time to wind down with my wife, I like to let all that go and just relax. Which means staying put for more than ten minutes at a stretch.
But Michael usually has at least one post-bedtime urgent issue that needs attending to; sometimes two, occasionally three or more. Staying put downstairs is virtually impossible. There is a direct correlation between my interest level in the show I’m watching and the chances that an urgent issue will arise.
Michael’s pleas for help used to be mainly “I want a drink of water,” but since we have folded that need into the regular routine, the urgent issues are now limited to things like “I’m scared” or “I need the fan on,” or “My covers fell off” or “I need my wormy,” or “What’s that red thing?” or “Why is it night?”
And depending upon many factors, the phase of the moon figuring in there somewhere, my response to these concerns of his (as I have related in posts past) can range from tender sympathy to snorting bull anger.
Last night we had just settled down to watch “Deadliest Catch” to learn the fate of the doomed vessel Katmai.
Over the conversation in the room, I heard Michael’s call from upstairs: “Daddy!”
I heaved a sigh, extracted myself from the nice cuddle I had going with my wife, and hauled my exhausted body up the stairs to Michael’s room, muttering something like “Sheesh, doesn’t he ever quit?”
“What?” I said, about midway between sympathy and annoyance.
“I can’t take it any more,” he said.
I told him to go to sleep, which he did.
Now that I’ve given it some thought, that was a pretty big statement for such a little guy.
Maybe I should have told him to scoot over so I could lie down and find out what weight he has on his shoulders.
Posted in dad, frustration, kids
Late last night, after ferrying my daughters back to their mom’s house and buying yet another gallon of milk, and once home shuffling through the dense layer of miscellaneous books, puzzles, wrappers and assorted wads of multicolored plastic junk in search of a comfortable spot on the couch, it occurred to me that the inscrutable elements I face every day are common to most, if not all parents.
In my head, I began to construct a list that might be used as a test a person could take to determine what level of parenting helstatus he or she has reached. Or at least, it can be a reassurance to us all that we are not alone in our plight.
This is as far as I got before I nodded off:
You find that you do not use the word “Legos” in a sentence without preceding it with an off-color four-letter word.
You have used the phrase “It’s right where you left it!” more than three times yesterday.
You do a week’s worth of grocery shopping on Monday, and find no food in the house on Tuesday.
You can carry two thirty-pound items to the front door, work the key in the lock, open the door and successfully keep a very eager cat from escaping outside while you’re going inside.
You have at some point discovered gum in your microwave.
While digging in your garden, you have come across a kitchen spoon, chalk, Monopoly money, a green plastic army man, a McDonald’s toy, socks, and/or a **** Lego.
You cringe at the thought of setting bare feet in the family room, knowing that doing so would eventually mean agony, along with having the words “Made in China” embossed in reverse on the sole of your foot.
Quiet in your home makes you uneasy.
All of your valuable objects are stored at least five feet off the floor.
You don’t remember the last year you had ornaments on your Christmas Tree.
You find yourself longing to get back to your workplace so you can relax.
You have given serious thought as to how there could possibly be a lake at the bottom of the ocean.
You’ve licked something off of your arm and instantly regretted it.
You wonder what you used to do with all of your free time.
Okay, readers. Any other items for the list?
I felt a little bad last night after shutting Michael’s bedroom door, having said “Goodnight” but not “See you in the morning,” as is the custom these days.
I couldn’t rightly say it, because it would have been a lie. My plan was to head into work early in the morning, well before he got up. My wife had graciously offered to handle all kid duties and leave me utterly free to get myself ready and breeze into work to make headway on my project.
“I’ll get Michael up and dressed and going and take care of everything else so you can concentrate on getting to work early,” she told me over breakfast Sunday morning.
“Really?” I asked. I knew she would gladly do that for me, it’s just that I felt guilty for leaving her alone to deal with the weekday morning machinations surrounding the cyclone that is our son.
“Yes, it’ll be fine,” she reassured me.
I did some extra work at home on Sunday, feeling motivated by the prospect of an easy morning on Monday. I worked on my laptop there at the kitchen table while Michael sat in his spot next to me, occupied by eating lunch and/or playing with his Leapster.
This morning, after breakfast and coffee, I packed up said laptop and assorted notebooks and papers, kissed my wife and beat feet out the door. I marveled at the steadily falling snow, having never seen snow fall here so late in the winter. My thoughts returned to Michael, and how he would react to know that daddy wasn’t there to make his waffles or take him to Ms K’s. I felt a pang of regret, messing up our routine.
Once in the office, I got my laptop out of the case and set it into the docking station.
I was immediately rewarded by a stabbing pain in my left hand.
I looked to see what it was that had poked my palm, and saw a toothpick broken off in the laptop’s headphone jack.
Michael. He must have shoved the toothpick in there when my laptop was sitting on the table next to him.
I almost got angry… but that was quickly washed away, knowing it was Michael’s little calling card.
Even though he couldn’t tell me in person, Michael had found a way to say “I love you, daddy!”
I’m hopelessly enmeshed in a project at work. I scarcely have time to read let alone write. Not my favorite of conditions.
But it’s an important project, one that has what we in the biz call “A Deadline”; a date that is rapidly approaching. And still, there are some within the organization who are attempting to pile more on as we wrap things up. Looming due are specifications, designs, presentations, management reports.
So needless to say, I’m a little stressed.
On the way home from work last night, after picking up my daughters at their mom’s, I geared myself up for an evening of chaos at home: all the kids are there and we had only a short time to get dinner made.
My wife and I moved as one in our tiny kitchen, preparing the evening meal and expertly dodging each other while also lending assistance to each other. She’d had the salad nearly done when I walked in, and I started in shaping hamburger into patties. She needed the salt and pepper, I passed them. I needed a knife, she passed me one.
As I slapped the meaty disks down onto the waxed paper, I surveyed the scene ahead. Michael sang along with Ariel, the little mermaid. Sister L worked on her sketches. Sister S fired questions back at me about algebra. Sister B made random appearances, sweeping through the kitchen to pour herself a short glass of milk, never once taking the cell phone off her ear.
Michael now dances along to “Under the Sea.” He’s told me recently that he wants to be a ballerina.
Sister L remains firmly entrenched in her sketch book, drawing figures in Anime style, and doing remarkably well.
Sister S calls me over.
“I don’t get this one.” She shows me a stubborn algebra problem that won’t solve itself.
“Okay, what is 2x times 8x squared?”
“10x?”
“No… what is 2 time 8?”
“16”
“Right, and x times x squared?”
“Where are you seeing that?’
I pointed my tallow-coated index finger at the problem.
“Right there, in the first term. You have to multiply the outside factor with each of the factors inside. You’ll get two terms, because of the plus sign.”
“Oh, I see.”
She continues on. I’m proud of myself for being able to explain concepts of algebra and season hamburger at the same time.
Michael fires back some questions about things he’s seeing in the movie:
“What the turtle dooz?” “Why Ariel is sad?” “Whats Ursula means?” “What their names are?”
I do my best to answer them.
“He’s dancing.” “She wishes she could be human.” “She’s the sea witch.” “Flotsam and Jetsam.”
Sister B does not make an appearance (and won’t until shortly before it’s time to leave), but we can hear spurious bursts of laughter from upstairs as she chats with one of her friends.
I realize now that this is my stress relief. We’re each doing our own separate things, but we’re doing them all together.
Yup, chaos.
But it’s wonderfully orchestrated chaos.
And I wouldn’t have it any other way.
On tonight’s menu, pizza. I get a hankering for that on occasion, and the only brand I like is the one that comes out of my own kitchen.
Mostly it’s because of the crust. I like a very simple crust, thick and springy.
So it’s while I was kneading the dough that Michael got this strange notion to talk to it, and call it an old lady.
His sister L was standing close by as well, calling the kneading action play by play: “Smash! Smash! Poke, poke, poke, poke, fold, stretch, smash!”
Because that’s what she does.
Michael piped up: “Hey, old lady! I don’t like you!”
Naturally I had to play along. I picked up the dough and worked it like a puppet: “Well, I don’t like you either, ya young whippersnapper!” I said, in a high, quavery and very annoyed old lady voice.
“What are you doing, old lady?”
“What’s it look like, sonny? Gettin’ the tar whupped out of me, that’s what!” the old lady lump of dough said.
Meanwhile, L went on with her color commentary:
“Smash! Smash! poke, poke, poke, smash!”
“Hey, old lady! You’re getting smashed!”
“Well, if you were getting yerself all beat up by this guy, you’d get smashed too!”
Then I had to chuckle to myself about that last sentence.
Having kids makes you say the strangest things.
Monday night, Michael’s mommy was pretty tired. Given recent events and the recovery thereof, she’s understandably a little less than 100 percent lately. So after cleaning all day and dealing with a four-year-old for a good portion of the remainder, it was entirely within her rights to sit down and take a breather, and watch her daughter play Guitar Hero III on our new Wii.
Michael doesn’t see it that way. Her break is his opportunity. He figures “she’s not doing anything else, thus she is free to do what I want her to.”
So when Michael’s sister became fatigued at playing “Slow Ride” for the thirteen thousand four hundred thirty second time and handed me the guitar for me to play for the first time, my wife wanted to watch to see whether my experience at playing a real electric guitar had any bearing on whether or not I could jam on the Wii version.
Michael was not impressed.
“Mommy? Mommy? Mommy?” he persisted, standing just inches before her and calling out loudly.
“Hang on a second, Michael. I want to watch this,” she said.
“Mo-ooooooommmm! Mommmmmy! Maaaaawwwwwwmmmmmmeeeeeeeeeeee…. Mommy! Mommy! Moooooooooommmmmy!” he continued.
She kept watching me play. I had decided to play “Barracuda” because I still like that song, unlike “Slow Ride,” which I’ve now come to loathe. Particularly because my stepdaughter insists upon selecting the Shirtless Punk Rocker character for her on-screen persona in the band, which creeps me out on a number of levels.
Michael was undaunted.
“Pleeeeeease, mom? Mommy? Come on, mommy! I want you to come with me!”
“No, Michael. I want to watch daddy play for a minute.”
“No! Mommy, come ooooooooon!” he tugged at her hands as she sat there, unyielding. “Mommy! Come on! Please! Come with me!”
“Michael, I want to stay here and watch daddy play! Just give me a minute!”
Sensing defeat, he backed up, and with an angry countenance and great flourish threw his clenched fists downward and shouted “BARNACLES!”
I must give kudos to the creators of SpongeBob for supplying my child with an easily assimilated and entirely satisfying alternate curse word. He could have said a lot worse.