Sep
9
“Horse. Horse. Horse? HORSE. Donkeys. Donkeys. Mooooooooo. Moooooooo. DONKEYS! Farm? Farm. Baaa. Baaa. Doat? Doat. Horse. Cock-a-loo. COCK-a-loo. Horse. Moo? Moooooo. Birdie? Birdie? DUCK. DUCK! Duck. Horse.”
Dal Capo al Coda.
While Dylan can essentially be described as a pint-sized, squeaky-voiced farm-fetishizer these days, Riley at the ripe old age of four is busy developing some new personality traits I can only describe as PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS HOLY TELL ME THIS ISN’T WHAT FOUR IS GOING TO BE LIKE OH JESUS KILL ME NOW challenging. There’s the whining, for one thing, which has been ratcheted up to a new level capable of triggering a thrilling physiological response in my eyeballs involving them protruding from my skull by a good three or four inches and painfully vibrating at the ends of their optic nerves. There’s also the dramatic scenery-chewing over-reactions to mild knee-scrapings and other bodily injuries, which feature bloodcurling screams accompanied by howls of “NOOOO! NOOOO! NOOOO!” while people in neighboring counties sadly shake their heads and reach for phones to dial CPS.
Most upsetting to me, however, is how he’s dealing with frustration lately. The moment he’s thwarted by some activity he’s attempting—getting his bike turned around, for example, or untangling a string—he starts flipping out. “I CAN’T! I CAAAAAN’T!” he screams, becoming more and more agitated while I try and calmly remind him to take his time, ask for help if he needs it, try setting the bike down or a second, chill the fuck out before the nice lady from Protective Services comes by again, etc. Likely as not, the item in question gets hurled to the ground while he shrieks “I DON’T WANNA” and somebody gets a time out because Mommy’s eyeballs are doing that Warner Brothers thing again.
Dylan often expresses frustration by doing fishflops and angrily eating dog hair off the carpet, which is less than pleasant in its own right, but Riley’s I CAAAN’Ts make me sad because god, I just don’t want him to feel that way. I don’t want him to feel like he can’t. I want his world to feel like exactly what it is right now: wide open, everything spread before him.
I know he’s a little kid and things sometimes feel like a Really Big Deal even when they involve, like, taking a extra half second to un-Velcro his shoe before attempting to remove it. I know children are not exactly known for their patience. I know it’s not out of the norm for tiny things to morph into giant enormous overwhelming challenges that light up the TILT section of a preschooler’s brain, maybe particularly during times when they’re tired or hungry or their moon is in Uranus or whatever. But I worry a little about his self confidence. He can be a tentative guy, and I want to be doing everything I can to help him feel . . . you know, like he can. Or at least how to deal with life’s inevitable difficulties without resorting to a total system meltdown.
I guess the more I think about it, it’s less that he’s changed, and more that I have. I expect ridiculous histrionics from a toddler, but I expect more from my big boy. And for the 385727485th time, I wish there was a manual for all this.
Sep
7
JB has returned from hiking over 40 miles through glorious Rogue River wilderness and I am caught between paging through his photos and wishing with every element of my being to do the same trip sometime soon because oh my god the wild beauty of this part of the world—and peering with horror at his Spam-burger’d feet and thinking well maybe we could just raft it instead.
It was rough being on my own with the kids, particularly since Dylan seems to have entered a clingy stage that is in equal parts adorable and annoying as all fuck. All weekend long he crawled in my lap and turned around and around like a dog trying to mash its bed into submission. He walked behind me with his head stuffed against the back of my thighs, fiercely gripping my pants and half-dragging them to the floor. If I left the room, he staggered frantically after me, moaning and howling. At one point I found myself in the bathroom trying to take care of business in private, only to have Dylan collapse in tears on the other side of the closed door. Then Riley barged in, took one look at me, and announced I was doing it wrong because I forgot to push my penis down.
In addition to the clinginess, Dylan’s obsessed with pictures of farm animals and his favorite activity in the world is to sit on my lap with his chewed-up copy of Old MacDonald Had a Cerebral Event And Thus the Repetition or whatever it is while I flip the pages and he provides the color commentary. “Moo. Baa. COCK-A-LOO.”
This is a nice little bonding pursuit but truth be told there are only so many hours I can spend looking at photos of sheep before I start wondering just how many Advil Liqui-Gels a person needs to consume to put themselves into a coma, so in lieu of decent weather that would allow us to escape to the playground, I let the kids watch a fair amount of TV this weekend. Hey, say what you will about children’s programming, if Yo Gabba Gabba lets me take a whiz in peace, I’m all for it.
It was about an hour before naptime yesterday—a prime TV-zombification time period if ever there was one—when the television and DVD player mysteriously stopped working. Since I am a resourceful woman with creative problem solving skills, the first thing I did was rush to the computer and post the equivalent of Edvard Munch’s The Scream on Twitter. At first I waited, foot tapping, for someone to magically appear and fix my broken appliance, but no dice. Dammit. I went and peered into the entrail-like mess of cords behind the entertainment center, but it was like the time the toilet backed up and I opened up the tank: like, what the fuck am I even looking at, here?
I opened up Twitter again and someone mentioned checking the circuit breakers so I ran out to the garage and pulled open what I thought was the electrical thingie but was actually the panel for our water heater. I eventually found the circuit board but realized I didn’t know what I was looking for: would one of the little switches be holding up a sign that said “THIS BE’S WHY YOUR TV DON’T WORK”? I flipped some things at random, then went back inside, where the microwave clock was beeping and the printer was making its ponderous starting-up noises but the TV was still off and now Dylan was wailing because I’d left the house for .5 seconds and Riley was yelling “MAYBE DADDY NEEDS TO FIX IT” and I was like “DADDY IS AN ASSWIPE FOR RIGGING THE WORLD’S MOST COMPLICATED TV SYSTEM THEN RUNNING OFF ON SOME SAUSAGE-FEST MAN HIKE”.
Eventually, somehow, I randomly smashed a button titled “Switched Outlets” on some unknown piece of equipment and like that, everything turned back on. I guess this component protects all the other stuff from power surges or some such thing, but all I know is, it has a stupid dickwad button that makes everything stop working if a small child pushes it.
So it was right after the whole TV debacle that I got both kids ready for naps, tucked them into bed, strolled back out to the living room, fired up my computer and casually hit the “Update WordPress” link in my blog. Instantly, my whole website broke. With an audible snapping sound.
I won’t even detail all the clusterfuckery of getting the site fixed, except that I eventually paid my web hosting company $150 to help me restore it which did no good whatsoever and finally my friend Jon came through like a goddamned knight in shining blog-armor, but holy crap, I felt like some demented version of King Midas, where everything I touched turned to steaming piles of unresponsive technology.
The microwave clock still isn’t working. I have no idea how to reset it. Luckily, JB is home now, so I can probably offload that task. He owes me one, after all.
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