6 posts tagged “parenting”

Kama Kamikiliki!

Nov 25, 2008
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Had a rough morning? Really need a laugh? Try teaching your preschooler to say "Mele Kalikimaka." Funniest thing ever.

A whirlwind day today, a day that made me appreciate my stepmom and empathize with the constant manic pace she kept with six busy kids. I teach a scrapbooking class once a month as part of a recreational therapy program at a local rehab hospital - and Aaron, who usually rearranges his schedule to keep the boys for the afternoon, couldn't get away, leaving me faced with finding places for them. So - the dance of getting all three fed and out the door, Noah and Peter to friends' houses and David to preschool and myself to class just in time, then back to school for David only a minute late for pick-up, and retrieving Peter and Noah and stopping at the bank and the pharmacy and the library and then dashing home to await their grandparents, who took the older two out for dinner to give me a break while Aaron worked late - bless them, a chance to make a vat of soup for the freezer and run a load through the dishwasher. Phew.

The only thing keeping me from complete collapse is caffeine. If I ever win an award for anything, my acceptance speech will have to start with "I'd like to thank Diet Coke."

An Open Letter to McNeil Consumer Healthcare, Makers of Children's Motrin

Nov 12, 2008
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Dear McNeil Consumer Healthcare, Makers of Children's Motrin,

First, thank you for your satisfactory product. Children's Motrin has consistently been successful in bringing down my kids' fevers, something I've been especially grateful for this week as a last bastion against the unspecified virus that has staged a coup in our house and established martial law.

However: I take issue with your choice of Inactive Ingredients - specifically, D&C red #33, FD&C blue #1, and FD&C red #40. Don't get me wrong - I'm completely in favor of making a children's medicine that tastes like grape; far be it from me to eschew artificial flavorings in the name of resistance-free dosing - but why is it necessary to color the liquid purple? It can't be a brand identity gimmick; I can think of at least one other children's medicine in the same hue.

No, it must be that you chose that color to make a lasting impression on moms - moms who, when their child wakes at 5am with a fever the same temperature as her favorite radio station's frequency, give their child a purple teaspoonful of Children's Motrin before inviting him to come cuddle in their bed, trusting the violet elixir to make her darling comfortable. Moms who, five minutes later, are left with a lasting impression - a purple, indelible impression - on the duvet.

I hope you'll rethink your formula. I know I'll rethink giving Kool-Aid-colored medicine to a kid with a stomach bug.

Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad

Nov 9, 2008
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This morning was utterly horrific. Sundays are usually mildly-to-moderately horrific anyway; Aaron's job at our church means that he leaves for work not long after the kids and I are up, two hours before it's time for me to get the rest of us to church. Two hours sounds like a lot, but it is barely adequate for singlehandedly getting myself plus two rowdy preschoolers plus one infant all bathed, diapered, fed, dressed in something passably presentable, re-diapered, shod, jacketed, and into our trusty minivan. (I think if I had girls and had to add ponytailing and tights-wrangling to this equation I'd fall apart. Of course, girls may be less likely to need to be physically separated from each other after whapping each other with tv-remote "light sabers," so it may just even out.) Add temper tantrums, time-outs, and exploding diapers to the mix and all the commotion makes getting to church before the third worship song a real live miracle.

So today: utterly horrific. Normally my kids are reasonably well behaved - ordinary kids who pick at each other and want the toy the other has and grouse and poke and end up in time-out a handful of times on any given day, but who (I think - I hope) are generally obedient and disciplined. They act their ages, is what I'm trying to say. But today, the boys were overtired after a rare late night, and David is still recovering from whatever it is that knocked him out last week; so instead of acting their ages they were acting like wriggly puppies. With ADHD. And rabies. From the kennels of hell. Wriggly, venomous, evil, fanged puppies with glowing red coals for eyes.*

(*Aaron says I overstate a bit too much. I say hyperbole is the most powerful substance in the entire universe.)

We had snatching the toy and hitting and shrieking and hitting back and more shrieking and waking the baby, followed by time-outs and resistance and spanks and more shrieking and wondering if nine-thirty to was too early to begin drinking (just me, not the boys), and honestly I should've just kept them home at that point but I was desperate to interact with actual adults and hand the boys over to someone else for an hour so I pressed on, even past a sock-color-related tantrum and an eleventh-hour diaper catastrophe. We arrived so late that I had to park in the remotest corner of the parking lot and the boys' teachers were surprised to see them when they finally arrived at their classes.

I did my share of fuming and growling this morning - I was not a happy, pleasant, June Cleaverish mother shepherding her flock to the house of the Lord; I was frustrated, ill-tempered, and herding a litter of hell's puppies. Once we were finally in the van and hurtling down the highway toward the church, I launched into a recitation of their offenses that culminated with, "and you both made us VERY LATE and I am feeling VERY ANGRY about that."

There was silence from the back seat, and then David spoke up: "Mom? We need to apologize. We're very sorry for all the fighting and arguing and disobeying and making us very late."

"Yeah," said Noah. "I'm sorry, Mommy. Are you still feeling very angry?"

Oh, boys. We were so horrifically late that I missed not only the first three worship songs but also the offering and the really long prayer, but it didn't matter, because I was drawn closer to God in the van on the way to church this morning.

Motherhood Tip of the Day

Aug 28, 2008
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So. Say you've had a bad day, say you didn't bring your mommying A-game, and your kids are determined to kill each other before preschool starts, which isn't for TWO MORE WEEKS, and just thinking about those two weeks is making your shoulders tense and your skin crawl, making your tolerance for the picking and the fighting and the yelling shrink to nothing, so today you've yelled at your children, you've sent them to sit on their beds for extended periods of time, you've used your angry voice when you could've read picture books, provided crayons, defused tensions.

Here's a secret: If you make your kids chocolate waffles for dinner, they'll still go to bed thinking you're the best mom ever.

You're welcome.

Because I'm a perfect mother who has never once screwed things up.

Jan 5, 2008
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[Update: If you want to feel better about yourself (or at least less alone!) as a parent, or just as a person who sometimes isn't completely perfect, you should go read the stories Alice's readers posted - or, if you don't have time to page through 200-plus comments, at least read her recap. You won't regret it, unless you're the sort of person who is easily disgusted with humankind.]

One of my biggest fears as a parent - one of every parent's biggest fears, I think - is the one that goes Oh crap, I just scarred my child for life. I have had quite a few of these moments, some of them very recently, and I've thanked my lucky stars that my kids probably aren't old enough to remember these moments, at least not in enough detail to recount to their therapists someday; and then I get about the business of repressing all memories of the event very, very deeply so I never have to think about it again.

But today, Alice has opened the floodgates, with a post that begs readers for their worst parenting stories:

I need to know that you can be a good parent and still deeply, deeply suck at it, at times. Today, for instance. When I yelled so loudly at my son that my throat still hurts. (Did you know that mittens are an instrument of torture? That socks are painful? Neither did I, until I met Henry.) Thank god I don't have a deadline tonight because I need this glass of wine. And I need to go to bed before 8. And wake up in a few years, when he's able to dress himself.

I left one story in her comments box, but there are so, so, so many more I had to reject in order to keep my comment down to a reasonable length. Like the time I let David, then 15 months old, topple down the (non-carpeted!) stairs and land nosefirst on the (linoleum-covered concrete!) living room floor, because I was reading a book instead of paying attention.

Or the time when David was 2 and I was (extremely) pregnant with Noah and I came home from work to discover that David had found a black permanent marker while he was supposed to be taking a nap and spent the next three hours using it to redecorate his room. (I lost my temper more at Aaron than at David for that one; Aaron had put David to bed and then went to take a nap - something I've done myself a million times, but that was enough for me to place the guilt squarely on Aaron's shoulders. Never mind that I was the one who left the marker in David's room, and never mind that I've never actually admitted my own culpability for that incident to Aaron, or apologized for all the shrieking. Sorry, honey!)

And what about the time, not too long after we'd moved into this house, that we put 3-year-old David down for a nap in his second-story bedroom, with the door closed and his windows open, and went to watch TV - only to be interrupted by a neighbor's frantic knock at the front door, telling us that David had taken out his screen and was in the process of climbing out onto the roof? That was a proud day.

Lately, thanks to the patience-shredding combination of pregnancy, exhaustion, and being off my meds, I've been losing my temper in new, exciting ways. Most of my huffy impatience ends up directed at David (because, come on, how much time does he really need to put on his frigging shoes??), but when I have a spectacular tantrum, it's usually Noah-induced, because the boy is immune to parental discipline, immune. Giggles at spankings, nonchalantly endures time-outs, leaps tall "No!"s with a single bound. The more worked up and frustrated I get, the more he thinks it's a game. There are days that his laid-back, life's-a-party attitude makes me want to shake him. Do you think THIS is funny? Huh?? How about NOW??

Last night's meltdown was memorable. Noah is only recently out of his crib and in a big boy bed, and now that the novelty of the new bed has worn off, he has realized: FREEDOM! We installed a child-proof latch on the inside of his bedroom door, so he can't leave the room; but even so, all the child wants to do is pop out of bed every four seconds, like some sort of human jack-in-the-box. (A jack-in-the-box who is coming perilously close to finding himself listed on ebay.) It doesn't help that he thinks our admonitions to Get back in that bed! Right now! or spanks on the back of his hand are just part of this exciting new game; and last night, when Aaron had to work late and I was putting the kids to bed singlehandedly, I did a lot of screaming myself hoarse and - oh, I am so proud of this - holding him down by his shoulders to make him stay in his bed. Worked like a charm, of course. When Aaron finally got home at 10:30, I was a weeping ball of shame and frustration on the couch downstairs, and Noah was still wandering around his bedroom.

Ugh. I am going to go eat a cookie, and then I am going to call Child Protective Services and turn myself in.