Parents say the Darndest Things

When correcting Turtle and Monkey, I try to keep it short: “No hitting,” “No biting,” “No throwing food.” I do this to save my voice, since I say the aforementioned three sentences, and many others just like them, at least a thousand times a day.

I didn't expect to be a “No” parent. I carefully arranged our home to be as toddler-friendly as possible so that my little angels could thrive to their full potential, never being thwarted by the word “No.” But my imagination failed to match their curiosity, and so I am constantly saying “No” and pulling a child off a bookshelf (they have their own bottom shelf in every room, but only want the big books on the top shelf); out of the kitchen cabinets (they have their own cabinet to play in, just like the books instructed, but that isn’t enough); out of the toilet, out of the cat’s food, off the computer, out of the trash can, away from the hot stove, out of the plants, out of the diaper pail.

Sometimes I get confused by what I should say because the action is so random that I don’t even know how to describe it: “No . . . writing on your food?” I know I could be more nuanced in encouraging better behavior: “Kitty doesn’t like his food put into his water dish,” or “Markers are for paper, not for food.” But most of the time I just blurt out “No!” and then try to describe the offending behavior so they will know what to correct. Often what I say is so ridiculous that I look around to see if Candid Camera is watching. The following are the "No" statements in current rotation. These are in addition to my hourly diatribe of "No pushing, no biting, no hitting, no pulling hair, no throwing food," which I'm thinking of having tattoed on my face.

No putting bread on your head
No stepping on mommy’s face
No putting Lovey in the diaper pail
No pushing the highchair
No writing on your baby
No writing on the kitty
No writing on mommy
No climbing on the cat’s scratching post
No standing on the chair
No opening the washing machine
No banging on the window with Sonya Lee
No putting yogurt in your hair
No running when you have a pair of shorts on your head and can’t see
No pulling leaves off the inside plants
No eating Cheerios you find on the garage floor
No climbing on your table
No putting avocado in your hair
No standing in the tub
No touching the (insert every piece of technology you can think of).

I promise there are a million things they are allowed to do in the house. And I don’t always say “No.” There’s a whole other category of action that is not forbidden, just potentially unsafe. That’s my, “Be careful when you . . .” list. We’ll save that for another day.

Oh, Humanity

I have come to the realization that I am not super human. This fact is extremely annoying. It really cramps my style to have to take time out to eat and sleep every single day. Take Tuesday, for example. I had a small list of things to do while the girls napped: order flea medicine for the dog, address and stamp some Father’s Day cards, and do a prayer meditation to finally get to the root of the debilitating anxiety that has plagued me for a decade. Do you think I managed to do any of these things? Noooo. After I wasted 20 perfectly good minutes eating lunch, I found myself exhausted. “Oh yeah,” I thought to myself, “we had a really busy weekend and I didn’t sleep that much, so it’s catching up with me.” So I got into bed to rest for just a minute, and immediately fell into a deep sleep, waking well over an hour later to the sound of Turtle calling “mama, mama” into the monitor.

When I decided to stay home full time, I thought I would finally have time to get every nook and cranny of my house in perfect order, cook gourmet meals every evening, post daily to my heavily visited, income producing blog, write a book, and get my post-baby body into wedding-day shape. It has been quite a shock to learn that not only am I not physically capable of accomplishing these perfectly reasonable goals in the tiny windows of free time that I have, but that I need a mother’s helper three mornings a week just to maintain basic order and sanity.

Don’t tell me I’m being too hard on myself because I already know that. But I’ve lived my entire life measuring myself against an apparently impossible set of standards, and I can’t seem to find my “off” button. So I berate my body for stubbornly refusing to function on less than 8 hours of sleep when I clearly need at least 20 hours a day to meet my minimum goals. And I shake my fists in frustration when I am compelled to sit down and eat 3 or 4 times a day when there are filing cabinets to be organized, blog posts to be written, and psychoses to be healed.

Oh, and don’t worry that living this way is both unhealthy for me and a bad example for my daughters. I worry about that enough for the both of us. Now, please excuse me while I go make my list of all the things I won’t be getting done this weekend.

Sasha and her Dada

A couple of weeks ago I bought Turtle and Monkey a new board book, Barack Obama 101. The first page is a photo of the First Family and as I named each person in the picture, both girls shouted, “Sasha!” It must be a delightfully fun word to say as a new speaker – fast, slow, loud, soft - because all day long we hear “Sasha SESHA Sa-SHA sesha Sasha Sasha?” Turtle in particular asks for Sasha often, which means I have to go find the book, open it to Sasha’s picture, and let her give it a kiss. We have to put “Sasha” in her bed (the bookshelf) at naptime and at bedtime, and Turtle often cries when I ask her to put Sasha down for her nap. Then she’ll repeatedly ask about her (“She’s going to sleep right now Turtle”) until I turn out the light and leave the room.

Needless to say, we’ve renamed the book Sasha. They call the other character Dada. Sometimes we try to correct: “honey, that’s President Obama and yes, he’s a man like your Dada.” But most of the time we just say, “yep, that’s Sasha’s Dada” and go on to the pages featuring Sasha’s big white house, Sasha’s airplane, Sasha’s helicopter, and Sasha’s limousine.

I am thrilled out of my mind at this development. It happened almost simultaneously with their discovery of babies, about which I'm a little more ambivalent. One day they just started pointing at strollers and saying “Babies? Babies? Babies?” Then they found their dolls and tried to wrap them in blankets and put diapers on them. I was shocked at this turn of events, having neither encouraged nor discouraged dolls, instead just letting them sit ignored in the bin with the dozens of other apparently uninteresting stuffed animals. But suddenly every stuffed animal is also an object to be loved, and petted, and carried around, and kissed. So one day, I have two babies dipping spoons in cat litter and the next I have two little girls who love their Sasha, put their dollies to bed, and carry around stuffed puppies like they were real dogs.

I have to confess that I looked for a Sasha doll online. Twin Daddy disapproved. But I looked anyway, and guess what? Michelle Obama disapproves too. It’s probably for the best – the girls have already moved on to calling each of their dollies “Sasha,” which is infinitely more creative than me handing them a Sasha doll. It also shows me that they don't need a black doll to have a Sasha, and I'm proud that they are more color blind than I am.

With every new action the girls take, I wonder - what kind of connections are they making in their little brains right now? How will this early fascination with Sasha and Dada Obama develop their views on race? How do I encourage balanced play with gender-neutral toys when it’s so darned cute to watch them try to diaper their baby dolls?

And most importantly, where did my babies go, and who are these little mamas who have taken their place?

Happy Birthday Twin Momma!

On the eve of my 37th birthday, I have just one thing to say: Life is good.