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.

No More Pink Baseball Gloves!

The title of this post is my spin on the famous “no more wire hangers” scene from the movie Mommy Dearest. I think I’m a pretty patient and loving mom. But I have to say, if I ever see the aforementioned sporting good in my house I might go a little Mommy Dearest on someone myself.

Let me explain. I like pink. I’ve owned a couple of pink t-shirts in my day. I used to pretend I was one of the Pink Ladies from Grease. But I don’t know how or why pink has become the defining color of girlhood. Shirts, pants, dresses, bathing suits, shoes, shorts, potty chairs, tennis rackets, golf clubs, bicycles, all covered in flowers or butterflies, Disney princesses, Dora, or Hannah Montana. It is hard to shop for girls at a mainstream retail store and find something that is not pink with a princess on it. It’s no better for boys, who have the choice of blue or green, dog or shark, or Diego or Spiderman. The commercialism and the pink each make me crazy in their own special ways, and every time I go shopping for something for the girls, I end up gnashing my teeth and shaking my fist at the marketing gods.

I will admit I am a little biased against girly things – I scorned dresses as a girl; they got in the way of chasing boys and playing football, and I felt ridiculous (and angry) every time my mother forced one on me. My favorite thing to do as a young child was to sit outside and get dirty making sand castles and mudpies, and when I was a little older I liked to shoot hoops, ride my (red) bike, or climb a tree and pretend I was Harriet the Spy. My absolute favorite thing of all was to play catch with my well-worn brown leather glove (which was actually a hand-me-down from the boy next door, adding to its cache). I was proud the day I got hit in the mouth with a baseball thrown a little too fast by that neighbor, leaving me the biggest fat lip of my life, and I was disappointed it was summer so I couldn’t show off my injury at school. I loved playing t-ball, then softball; I was good at both, and playing those sports is one of my fondest childhood memories.

So let’s bring all that history of me into Target on that fateful day last month. Twin Daddy was looking for a toddler-sized soccer ball for the girls. I was browsing the sporting goods aisles, dreaming of the day when my girls would play in the mud and get hit in the face with baseballs. Then suddenly -BAM- I saw it, sitting on a peg. A pink baseball glove. I wasn’t sure if I would vomit or if my head would explode, so I put my hands on the side of my head and bent my chin to my chest to collect myself. Then I went and found Twin Daddy and unleashed a rampage on him, about how baseball was about being strong and running and catching and practicing and sweating and not about collecting flowers in right field with your f*%^$*# pink baseball glove.

He didn’t pay me much mind, as he was too busy trying to find a small soccer ball free of sparkly butterflies or blue sharks.

Twin Momma Takes a Break

I had a four day at-home vacation this past week when my friends M.D. and S.A. came to visit. I’m still recovering from eating my weight in barbecue and Tex-Mex and talking until the wee hours of the night (10:30PM). Since M.D. forced me to take a much-needed break from my childcare responsibilities by flying all the way from South Carolina (leaving her two kids behind), I want to honor her visit by continuing my break. I See Two is on hiatus this week. Check in next week for my diatribe against the children’s marketing machine that produced that vile pink baseball glove I saw at Target last month.

Uh-Oh

MEMO

To: Turtle and Monkey

From: Twin Momma

RE: Use of “Uh-Oh”

It has come to my attention that, despite repeated explanations, the phrase “uh-oh” is being grossly misused by certain members of this family. I hope this written explanation of the proper use of “uh-oh” will clear up the misunderstanding.

“Uh-Oh” is a phrase accompanying a minor, accidental, mishap. I cannot emphasize enough that the mishap must be accidental in order for “uh-oh” to apply. When your cup of milk slips out of your hands because they are wet from eating pineapple, that is an uh-oh. When you pick up your cup, look directly at me, and then throw the cup on the floor, saying “uh-oh” is not appropriate and will not make your insolent cup-throwing “cute” or “funny.”

You should also note that “uh-oh” comes after the accidental mishap has taken place, not before. Saying “uh-oh” right before you intentionally throw your plate of food on the floor is not acceptable.

When you tug and pull until you’ve ripped the flap off the page of your “lift the flap” book, don’t say “uh-oh.” You did it on purpose. I know you’re at that age of experimentation and all, but you’ve already ripped all the frogs out of your pop-up book and I can’t stand watching books get destroyed. Also, when you stand up in your crib and throw your Lovey out onto the floor, that is not an uh-oh. I know it’s a fun game for you and I don’t mind it at all, but I’d prefer if you said something like, “Mother, will you please hand me back my Lovey so I can throw him out again?”

One notable exception: when “uh-oh” is being used to refer to an earlier mishap. For example, the other day Turtle fell in the driveway and scraped her knee, and it bled a little and had to be cleaned up with Neosporin. Throughout the evening and all the next day, Turtle pointed to her scraped knee every now and then and said, “uh-oh,” apparently as a reminder of the incident, and/or to let us know that her ouchie still hurt. While this is not the traditional usage, it is extremely cute and will be allowed to continue. However, when you (Turtle) bite your sister so hard that it leaves a bruise, pointing at the bite bruise the next day and saying “uh-oh” is not appropriate. So not appropriate.

Now that the proper use of “uh oh” has been thoroughly explained, there is no reason to misuse the phrase any longer. Thank you for your attention to this matter.