Apr
2
I forgot to mention one of the nicest things about Riley’s age right now: he can be threatened. Perhaps you’re not into threatening small children, and to that I say, HAVE YOU TRIED IT? Because it is surprisingly satisfying! Go ahead, indulge your inner bully and take advantage of one of the few times in life you can completely control another human being’s happiness. DANCE FOR ME MONKEY-CHILD MOO HOO HA HA HAAAA.
In all seriousness I have no qualms resorting to the Dire Threat when necessary because the boy does not LISTEN. I can say “I need you to pick up your toys” six hundred and fifty times in a row and it’s like my voice has morphed into the Peanuts trumpet—mwaa waaa mwa wa wa mwaaaaaa—but tack on a “. . . or you don’t get to watch Curious George tonight” and hot damn, suddenly we’ve got some forward momentum.
Once we were at a playdate and Riley had been behaving like a particularly sub-standard citizen for nearly an hour straight, one meltdown after another, and I had run through my entire bag of parenting-book-advice tricks and was at a loss for what to do other than start combing his hair looking for the 666 tattooed on his scalp. Finally I hunkered down, grasped his shoulders, pulled him close, and hissed in his ear that if he didn’t start acting better I was going to take his beloved blankie and throw it out the window of the car on our way home. Call it cruel, but he shaped right up after that.
The 1-2-3 method is surprisingly useful, too, when he’s doing something obnoxious like grabbing for a pen I’ve just told him he cannot have. Sometimes just a glare combined with an ominous “ONE . . .” does the trick, but Riley often likes to live dangerously and wait until the death-pause that comes after “TWO—” before springing into action.
I don’t really know what happens after “THREE”. It’s like Room 101 in 1984.
Oh, and you know what else is awesome about a preschool-aged kid as opposed to, say, a 14-month-old? When they ignore your repeated warnings about whining or taking their brother’s toys or jumping on the couch or whatever it is, you can send them to their bedroom. I like to bust about the full name for that one: “Riley William S.! To your room this instant!” and off he goes at top speed, wahmbulancing his way down the hall and slamming his door before throwing himself on his bed to sulk. After a few minutes, he’s usually ready to come back out and join society; it’s like a system restart on whatever fucked-up kernel panic we’ve gotten ourselves into.
(Sadly, none of these methods are useful for babies, and it’s really too bad because there are at least twenty times per day when I would dearly love to send Dylan to his room. Or hover over his furious fishflopping body and say, “ONE . . .” and have something happen other than a mule-kick to the gut. Instead, it’s all about distraction and redirection, and while that’s often effective it’s slightly less satisfying to deal with a screaming devilspawn child by chirping, “Oh LOOK! A spatula! Do you want to play with a spatula?”)
Riley’s favorite question lately is “But why?” and I often find myself saying, “Because I say so.” I don’t really care if this is an unadvised course of action or not, sometimes that is the fucking sum and substance of the answer, as Al Swearengen might say. Someone recently told me how their friend’s kid—a kindergardener, I think—requires a reasonable explanation before she will do something she’s asked to do, and I was thinking, SERIOUSLY? THEIR PARENTS PLAY ALONG WITH THAT? Because I can only imagine what sort of rabbit hole you would get yourself into after a while. It would be like that Louis CK routine: “Well because some things ARE, and some things are NOT! Things that are NOT can’t BE, and—” Sure, I might explain to Riley that he needs to wear a coat because it’s cold, but if he continues to protest, well by god MY VOICE IS THE LAW.
I’m sure this is one of the brief stages in parenthood where I can actually get all Samuel Jackson on my kid’s ass if need be, because soon enough he’ll be all, “Uccccch. WHATEVER, Mom.” And I’ll be like, “one . . . ?”
Apr
1
Verdict: I decided to RSVP that we’d be happy to go on the DC trip. My thinking is to plan for the worst, that way I will at least be prepared if everything goes tits-up and I find myself ball-gagging a 3-year-old mid-flight and shooting him full of elephant tranquilizers.
I am not without lingering concerns, of course, but I’m thinking above all how nice it sounds to do something together, just the two of us. Even if I end up regretting it, I can’t pass up the chance to have an adventure that’s all our own. So much of my time lately is spent distracted by my 14-month-old — chasing Dylan, trying to feed Dylan, pulling clumps of dirt out of Dylan’s mouth, attempting to calm Dylan down as he screams bloody murder about the mighty injustice of being restricted from the dirt-choking he so deeply enjoys — that I often feel like I barely get a chance to focus completely on Riley, and how awesome of a kid he really is these days. Sure, he sometimes causes my ears to firehose giant arterial spurts of blood and brain matter when he cranks up his Whine-O-Meter to full capacity, but on the rare occasions we’re out and about by ourselves it’s a real joy to be able to fully experience him for who he is right now: smart, funny, articulate, weird as an LSD-dosed Martian.
Some of you mentioned that he probably wouldn’t remember the trip and thus it might not be worthwhile, and while I know what you’re saying my feeling is that it doesn’t really matter to me if he’s unable to detail this trip with perfect clarity in his bestselling memoir someday down the road. He may not remember it when he’s older, but if that was the only criteria we used for providing our children with interesting or pleasant experiences, we’d just keep them in feces-filled cages for the first few years of life until they grew out of this miserable business of being so YOUNG and NEEDY and cramming DIRT in their mouths all the damn time, right? Okay, maybe not, but with little kids it is sort of about making happy moments when you can, with no particular expectations about the effects of doing so.
Also, I wouldn’t be surprised if he does remember it, because his memory has shocked me on more than one occasion. Recently we drove by a Bartell’s where I’d taken him with me at least six months back and bought, among other things, earplugs, and he pointed to it and announced, “Hey! There’s the earplug store!” Just two weeks ago we were talking about Easter and Riley described looking for eggs and how there were M&Ms inside the eggs, which is what we did last year. And strangest of all, maybe a year ago or more he told me about how we had once had Christmas at Uncle Joe’s house, which did in fact happen — when he was, like, 14 months old.
Nine times out of ten the kid can’t remember where he put his shoes, but he’ll turn around and describe with great accuracy the plot of a Curious George show he’s seen exactly once. You never know, is what I’m saying. Children’s brains are mysterious things.
I did talk to him about the trip last night and he was very excited, if a bit confused (“We will ride in a ROCKET to a MUSEUM!”). We talked about how planes are kind of loud and he decided he would bring his blanket to cover his ears, and he requested that we bring a “tiny TV” so he could watch old Battlestar Galactia episodes cartoons.
So! We’ll see, I guess. After all this pondering over things I’ll probably find out I’ve been bumped from the invite list. If we do end up going, I’m thinking I’ll need to get an easy-to-carry umbrella stroller, arrange for transportation that includes a booster seat (is this even possible? Don’t tell me I have to carry a carseat across the US for a freaking cab ride, please god), and a prescription for a large amount of alprazolam. For ME, of course. Come on, it’s not like I would carefully grind it into an undetectable powder and mix it with some apple juice and have it in a sippy cup ready to offer at the first sign of trouble, or anything.
-
My product review site:
[