Category Archives: Parenting

“Conditioning our children”

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“Green and green” is my mantra to Micah now as I drop him off at kindergarten.  They are using the “stoplight” system – green is good, yellow is your warning, red is trouble.  At the end of the day, the teacher puts a “face” (smiling green, flat-lined yellow, frowning red) on a sheet of paper that comes home in the folder.  I pick up Micah and look at the sheet every day and we talk about the day.

Last week was rough….On the previous Friday, Micah was yellow for school and his after-school teacher wanted to “talk to me” (so far, I’ve never been excited to have a teacher want to talk to me….maybe they need to start making up some good stuff, because I’m starting to get Pavlovian conditioned to not want to walk into the after school building to pick up Micah!).

Anyway, on Friday he was yellow and yellow.  I said “aw, that’s too bad, Micah.  I did plan to take you for a surprise treat at Rita’s if you were green and green.” He sobbed…literally from the bottom of his heart sobbed all the way to the daycare center to pick up the brothers.  He wasn’t upset about the treat – he was upset that I didn’t tell him about the “reward” ahead of time.  He thought it wasn’t fair to “surprise” him like that.  I thought as I drove along – all those years of training, 7 years of grad school in psychology learning that “variable-ratio schedule of positive reinforcement in operant conditioning” is best (ie, “Variable-ratio schedules occur when a response is reinforced after an unpredictable number of responses. This schedule creates a high steady rate of responding.” http://psychology.about.com/od/behavioralpsychology/a/schedules.htm) – all for naught.  My son is tearfully telling me that psychology doesn’t work for him!

So now we’re back to “green and green, Micah, green and green….and I’ll take you to Rita’s.” Monday – yellow and yellow.  I spend a long time talking to the afterschool teacher about Micah being a “boy boy” and that after 5 hours of academics in kindergarten, the only thing he wants to do in afterschool is play (worksheets and more worksheets and sitting at a table with his head down along with the rest of the class is not really what he wants to be doing).  Yes, I agree that he needs to listen to his teachers, but I’d like to know that his teachers are also striving to match a 5 or 6-year-old’s developmental stage.

Tuesday – yellow and yellow.

Wednesday – red….hmmm, apparently Micah has decided to become the class clown with “potty words.”  Yes, Mr. M., I do inform Micah that those words are inappropriate (I think at the same time about Micah and Ryan sitting at the dining room table every night cracking each other up with pee and poop stories….).  You know, Mr. M., I do think he’s doing it for (ahem) positive reinforcement, I mean, there wouldn’t happen to be a group of boys sitting around him cracking up, would there?  Right.  (Psychology at work.)

Thursday – yellow and green…progress.

Friday – green and green!  Wahoo – Rita’s!!  We stop.  We get an ice cream cone for

This machine is outside our local fire station!

him, a guava ice for me.  We’re so happy.  He eats half and throws it away – it’s too cold for ice cream he informs me as we walk through the farmer’s market across the street.  Kettle corn – now that’s what we need.

So, are you going to get Pepsi or Coke out of this machine?  How do we match our expectations for our kids with the reality of how they function?

Brave face….in the face of loss

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Our house has been on the market for over a year.  It’s a torturous process.  An agent calls, we work into the wee hours of the morning to clean up all remnants of 5 little boys, we vacate the house (often hanging out at my mom’s)….I carry 8-10 large plastic bins of cleared items (including the countless sippy cups and sippy cup parts from the countertop) down into the basement, stack them up among the 30-40 other storage bins already down there….and then slowly bring them all back up one by one in the days after a house showing as we remember things we need next.  Well, it’s usually me wondering things like, “where’s the bundt pan to make this cake?”… “what happened to the metal spatula that I like using to get the cookies off?” … “where do all the sippy cups keep going?” (some of them do find their way behind the couch or under the seats in the car, only to be thrown away once found if they meet the black-inside criteria).

All this is to say that having one’s house on the market is a Pain with a capital P.  But what has really been troubling me (other than my back when carrying all those bins) over the past year is a sense of a slow leak…a slow, yet accumulating loss of things.  I find myself often thinking, “I wonder where I put that x, y, or z the last time we packed up the house?”  “I can’t remember where I put….”  And, it’s almost like Christmas to the boys when we go to my mom’s house and they find one of the bins with their toys in it “Oh, look, it’s our Batman-mobile!!  Look, here’s our tractor!!”  I get the same joy occasionally – “Oh, look, here’s a bin full of cereal boxes…most of which have expired!”  But generally, I find myself frustrated and grieving the loss of items which I used to rely on.

Naturally, these simmering feelings were blown into gargantuan size this past week with the burglary of our house.  Frustration, grief, anger, sadness.  Kathy was on the local news the next day telling our story.  A friend called to tell me she was “coming up” on the news as I pulled into the driveway.  “Oh, I’ll run inside and watch,” I said….followed quickly by “oh, we don’t have a TV.”  Noah falls asleep in one of his unique, semi-unsafe positions and I long to reach for the camera and capture another “Noah sleeps” moment.

Yet, all of that is nothing compared to the loss of my memory.  I have sudden amnesia. Sudden Alzheimers.  And yet, I am not sick.  It’s just that I entrusted my memory to a machine because there was so much within my brain and now that machine has left me….and so has the memory of Micah’s first word and when he learned to walk.  So has the memory of how many classes I’ve done for “continuing medical education.”  So has the work that I’ve put into building a crisis nursery….hours upon hours of work….gone.

So I spent the week walking around with an ache inside and a brave face in front.  “Doing okay,” I’d say and then tell the story of how Bazer the police dog chewed up the furniture.  I’m really good at telling a funny story.  It keeps my own emotions in check.  And people have told me all week “Wow, you’re brave. You’re strong.”  And most of the time I feel like I am and then I crash – big time.  I come home late one night and the older boys are in bed without their respective pull-ups on….and the blankets and the sheets and the jammies are soaked through….and I explode.  Fueled by my anger of loss….it actually doesn’t matter what small thing sparked the explosion.  Fueled by an older son who does not want to hear that his dearest “blue blankie” is saturated with urine and thus must be washed NOW.  Fueled by the audacity of someone to invade our privacy and safety.   Slamming doors, kicking, muttering under my breath….I finally lay in the bed and sob.  That’s where the brave face falls apart sometimes.  And the words of Mandisa’s song “What if we were Real” run through my head:

“Well, I’m tired of saying everything I feel like I’m supposed to say

I’m tired of smiling all the time, I wanna throw the mask away

Sometimes you just have a bad day, Sometimes you just wanna scream ….

We keep trying to make it look so nice, And we keep hiding what’s going on inside

But what if I share my brokenness, What if you share how you feel

And what if we weren’t afraid of this crazy mess, What if we were real.”

What I’ve slowly come to realize in my week of working through this, is that while it’s important for me to be strong and protect my children – that’s the only face I show them most of the time.  The face that says “Mommy has this all altogether.”  I rarely show them the “real” me.  The hurt me.  The angry me (well, no – they know that one really well).  The sad me.  They need to see those faces sometimes too so that it’s safe for them to be “real.”  So tomorrow we’ll buy a dog bone for Bazer in case he wants to come back and visit sometime and we’ll all practice being real.

Smitten by a Kindergartener

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“My baby girl fills a place I didn’t even know was empty. I am positively smitten.”  (K.H.)  I love this line that I “borrowed” (with credit) from a friend in her Facebook stream.

I also love vicariously reliving the “smitten” stage of the first-born child.  There is something so wonderful and special about those magic moments.  Those moments when time stands still and you realize that you have sat on the couch for two hours listening to the uneven yet peaceful breath of your baby and your mind has been still and content.  Those moments when you stare into your baby’s face and realize you never knew love could be so powerful and so peaceful and so strong.  Those moments when you realize your life has changed forever and you’re so thankful for that.

I watched my friend cuddle her 2-year-old son on the subway during our recent trip to New York City.  Her arms wrapped around him.  Her face bent forwards to snuggle against his cheek.  She spoke softly, whispering. Smitten. Blissful.

I was on the other side of the train – restraining a one-year-old with one arm, “spotting” the three-year-old as he bounced around looking out the window into the darkness and jumping back to look at all the people on the train, and verbally reminding the 6-year-old to “hold on,” “sit down,” and “be quiet.”  There was no quiet within my brain.  And yet, I was still okay with it all the chaos and the madness of my three.  (Alright, actually….I was thinking “yes…just you wait until baby #2 is born and then all of that lovey-dovey-attentiveness will change.  Just you wait.”  Not in an evil-haha kind of way, but in a reality-is-coming kind of way 🙂 .)

You see, I have a great friend who has 4 little boys about the same ages as my three guys (poor dear – she’s amazing!).  And we are good for each other because we are honest with each other.  And we agree that we absolutely love our boys.  No questions about it.  But we don’t always feel that love.  Sometimes, I’m just going through the motions of care-taking. Sometimes I’m just changing another diaper, wiping another snotty nose, putting on another pair of shoes that I just put on and that he just took off again.

And sometimes, I am “not happy with your behavior” and the love feels far away.  Present, but currently unavailable.  But then I sneak into the boys’ bedroom before I go to sleep each night, and lean over to kiss each one (a blown kiss to the little guy whose crib mattress is too far away), and whisper I love you.

Yet, it is in some of the “big moments” of parenting when I am overwhelmingly reminded that I am still, 6 years later, smitten with my boys.  This week Micah started kindergarten.  I stood along the wall of the church’s gymnasium and watched as he made new friends with the boys sitting beside him as they waited to go to their classroom.  I signed “I love you” whenever I caught his eye, and I gave him a kiss as he walked away from me.  The tears flowed by the time I reached the anonymity of my car.  My boy.  Kindergarten.  The start of the journey of school.  And as I drove to work through the fog of my eyes, the chorus of a song played over and over in my brain – “well done, well done…” (Moriah Peters).  It just seemed to sum up my love for him, all the work that we’ve done together over the past six years, all of that – well done – you got him to kindergarten!

I did much better the next two days of dropping him off, until I opened his backpack Friday evening and found a card that Micah made at school.

A Handful of Love

(by D. Conway)

It was my first week of school,

And now that it’s done,

I can’t wait to tell you

About all the fun.

We read a book called The Kissing Hand

About Chester, a sweet raccoon.

He went to school up in a tree,

Beneath the shining moon.

Chester was scared and a little shy,

Until his mom kissed his hand.

It sent the love right up his arm,

Towards his heart for it to land.

Just like Chester, I was brave

Because of love from you.

I made this gift so I can show

How much I love you, too!

It’s Mommy’s birthday – be nice!

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It’s my birthday today and I was wondering if I’m going to be retirement age before I get to blow out my own candles again.  By that time, I probably won’t have enough breath to blow them all out.  I’ll have spent it over the years yelling at the boys to stop picking on each other.

I did try that feeble attempt today.  “It’s Mommy’s birthday. Can’t you be nice to each other for just one day?”

  • Can you please stop squirting each other with the water gun in the back seat of the car?  Wait a minute, why do you even have a water gun IN the car?!?
  • Will you please stop trying to knock each other out of the way as you clamber into the car, squeeze through a doorway, rush for a cup of milk – pretty much go anywhere or do anything?!?  Why can’t you take turns?
  • Can you please stop yelling that Noah’s fire truck noise is giving you a headache while you play your DS?  Can you please stop yelling that Micah’s DS is giving you a headache while you repetitively push the siren button on the fire truck?  Can you both please stop yelling as you are definitely giving me a headache as I drive!
  • Can you please stop wrestling around under that quilt in the middle of the kitchen floor?  Can’t you just wrestle peacefully in the living room?!?  But don’t break anything.
  • Can you please just behave like Seth does?!?  He doesn’t get into trouble. (“But, Mommy, Seth doesn’t do ANYTHING yet!”  I know – isn’t it great?)
  • Can you please go back to sleep?  It’s only 5:46 am and it’s my birthday!  Oh wait – here’s my iPhone, watch something.  (This is called the night-owl, single-mom get-a-bit-more-sleep strategy.  That one additional hour of sleep on the weekends is so precious that sometimes I don’t even know what Micah is watching!)

I think if you had asked me twenty years ago if I ever imagined myself in this place – single woman with three beautiful active boys – I would have said “no way.”  But if you ask me today if I’d change that, I’d say “no way.”  Even if I do spend much of my energy pulling them off of each other, reprimanding them, encouraging them to use “nice” words, picking them up, putting them down, moving them from one spot to another, buckling them into the car, unbuckling them out of the car, changing diapers, changing clothes (and no, not interested in washing brown stuff from underwear even on my birthday!), putting them into high chairs, taking them out of high chairs, carrying laundry to the basement, carrying kids’ clothes back up from the basement, throwing baseballs, throwing Frisbees, chasing them around the yard, chasing them around the inside house loop, pulling them off the staircase for the thousandth time, following them up the staircase for the eight-hundredth time, brushing teeth, reading just one more book, patting backs and singing lullabies….even with all that, and more, in a single day, I wouldn’t change it.

Those boys are my birthday blessings and I love them.

The Pediatrician in Me

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Sometimes it really pays to be a pediatrician as well as a mother.  Take yesterday afternoon for example.  At precisely 3:51pm, Micah looked at me and said “this ear really hurts.” (“Darn!” was my first thought – “oh, honey” were my first words.)  Now, there are very few lessons from my residency training program that I remember verbatim, but I do remember a senior doctor telling me, “If a child older than 4 says their ear hurts, it’s likely to mean something real.”  So I went to the “medicine bag” and pulled out my otoscope (very handy to be a pediatrician), smiled happily that the battery was charged enough that the light turned on, and looked in Micah’s ear.  Yep, that eardrum was screaming red.  So, I thought through the options….see a doc?  Hmm, pediatrician’s office is closed…could go to the hospital’s urgicare satellite clinic….seems like a pain because it would take the rest of the afternoon (and I’m planning on cooking up some yummy Thai food!)….hmmm, Target pharmacy is open until 5…. Picked up the phone ….. “Hi, this is Dr. Lynne…”

And that is pretty much where the limit of me treating my own kids ends (my sister will vouch for that – I don’t even treat her kids…..and no one else in the family either!).  I will do ear infections on the weekend.  That’s it.  Anything else – “go see a doctor.”

You see, I can’t be objective when it comes to my kids.  This winter Micah fell in basketball and naturally cried for a bit afterwards…but was soon back in the game.  The next day (yes, after paying no attention to his hand for well over 30 hours) I noticed that his right thumb was swollen 3 times its normal size and was black and blue.  It looked ugly.  It was Sunday evening.  Seth was to have minor outpatient surgery on Tuesday.  I had a day to figure out what to do.  So, I spent most of Monday driving him around wondering how best to get the thumb evaluated.  His pediatric office?  The emergency room (over 3 hour wait time per some inside sources)? Does it need anything at all?  What if I ignore it and then it’s actually broken and we go 2 more days?!?  We ended up at the hospital’s urgicare center where he was fitted with a very nice little splint…more to help him feel better, the doc said (but I knew it was actually more to help me feel better).

I get stuck in wanting to do everything I possibly can to take care of the kids as well as I can.  But that’s in the midst of not knowing sometimes what the best care is for them.  And believe me, this is only mild stuff we’ve been dealing with.  A little asthma.  A little ear infection.  Colds.  Fevers.  Nothing serious – no real emergency room visits (though I was sure Noah was trying absolutely positively EVERYTHING he could to require an ER visit before he turned two – “how about a few stitches, Mom??” – and I give myself full and unending credit for thwarting that plan!) and no hospital stays.  I am very thankful.  Because I have decided that I will either overreact with the kids (oh yeah, it’s clear, that’s one of those can’t-catch-your-breath, have-10-seizures, fall-over-and-get-a-concussion, lose-a-kidney, break-the-thumb and end up in the hospital kinds of situations) or completely under-react (oh, just rub it!).  There’s no middle ground.

Which is why, unless it’s a weekend evening and they are complaining that their ear hurts…I drag my kids to go see a doctor every time.  (Though I will confess to being a tad late on this last guy’s well child check-up….um, 15 month visit?…. or 16 months ….who’s counting?!?!)

Anyone else have this trouble of under- or over-reacting??

Surviving New York City Madness

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I’m not sure how it happened, but somehow I just survived 3 days in New York City with three young boys (6, 3, and 1).  It’s probably entirely related to the fact that I traveled with a good friend who is very easy-going, her 2-yr-old son and her nanny (whose back should be sore from holding my 1-year-old most of the time in a front-pack!).

I personally only had one minor explosion, I think — trying to navigate a stroller out of a narrow NYC Starbucks doorway on day one — with octopus hands lunging from both sides of the stroller and two boys fighting each other for the right to get through the doorway first, despite the presence of said stroller.  And a very sweet woman holding the door open for me heard me mutter “I can’t do New York City by myself with 3 little boys.”  Without a pause, she affirmed, “no, you can’t.  It’s too hard.”  Fortunately, my friend is wonderful enough that I repeated the same phrase to her shortly afterwards despite my usual hesitancy to ask for help.  From then on, my youngest was graciously strapped to the nanny most of the time and I was able to have hands free for two other boys who liked to dart away.

I was pretty stressed about how Micah would behave during the trip, knowing that triggers for his outbursts include tiredness (how could he not be tired, traveling in a car for 9 hours, getting to bed late in a new environment, walking and sightseeing, pushing past thousands of people….), lack of consistency (every day we visited something different), and hunger (it’s hard to figure out new places and new food, finding food in time before blood sugar crashes, and really, where can you get “chicken nuggets and ketchup” in NY City?).  So the fact that I only had one minor from him when he cut his lip on a water bottle (that he was trying to open with his teeth despite multiple reprimands to “never do that!”) and then again a few minutes later when waiting in the sun in a crowd of hundreds of people trying to get on the ferry leaving the Statue of Liberty island…Wow.  I am impressed with him.

So here’s what I learned from our trip:

  • No matter how impressive the “tourist” sites are in a new city, the most favorite place of all is the local playground.
  • My 3-yr-old will continue to challenge his immune system no matter where we are.  Apparently (according to the nanny), he ran his Hot Wheels pickup truck up and down the benches at the playground, through the sand, across the open rim of a garbage can, and then right into his mouth!
  • Kids six and under have absolutely no concept of how high the Empire State Building is (nor do they care about the history of how it was built), but they sure are impressed by the 10-minute “Sky Movie” ride simulating flying over and around New York City (and bumping into people in Central Park and into a shark in the bay! Who knew there were sharks in the waters of NY City?).
  • Any and all bottles of fluid, no matter how costly (even if $3 for 16 ounces), will be spilled – including red Powerade onto my fresh mozzarella and basil hot Panini sandwich that I was just about to pick up to eat.
  • It is scary to think how easily the one-year-old could fit through the criss-cross wires on the observation deck of the Empire State Building – 86 floors up!
  • It is important to travel with good friends who are comfortable letting each other’s kids take turns having melt-downs….as well as multiple requests to return to the playground.
  • There are a LOT of dogs in New York City and one can get tired of the “can I ask the owner?” question prior to petting each and every one of them.
  • I can see why New York City parents might worry about “nanny stealing” – there was a clear difference in the spectrum of nannies available for observation at the playground.  I wanted to bring one of them home with us!
  • There’s no guarantee of getting good sleep after a long drive. Got home at 1:30 am, tucked in the boys, and my head hit the pillow at 2:00am – and then some alarm on one of my running watches went off at 2:01…. and then the 3-year-old crawled into bed with me at 2:09 after a nightmare…ahhhh!  But the sense of accomplishment this morning made it all worth it.

So, here’s a photo of our “calm and bliss” traveling together…but photos only capture the moments of glory.  This was taken right after Micah’s first melt down and his refusal to accept an ice cream cone.  So I held his which Seth shared with me and his white  T-shirt.  Noah also demolished one but not before it melted into a river dripping down his arms.  Stickiness did not stop him from playing with the “coin” a friend gave him which he dropped over and over, bent down to pick up repetitively, and clearly has his right hand raised, playing with the quarter in his mouth.  Seth was tired of the front pack and being given over to someone “new,” so clung to me.  Micah’s shorts and my pants are red on the front from the Powerade that spilled on my lunch and the backpack holds tiny Statue of Liberty snow globes the boys picked out as souvenirs…among a TON of other heavy stuff.  That’s the story behind this “calm” – and thank goodness there are moments of tenderness like this.  We might even go again some day!

Top Ten – Disney

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Top Ten ways my two-year-old tried to drive me crazy at Disney World:

10.  Must touch every open garbage can and/or push the swinging lid of garbage cans which are within a ten-foot radius of one’s steps…or can be reached without Mom stopping me prior to touching.

9.  Must climb up, walk along as far as possible, and then jump off every wall that is, say, under four feet high.

8.  If Mom decides to bridle me with a lamb “backpack” (aka dog leash – I’m no fool!), must pull forward as quickly as possible into oncoming people….or stop suddenly and explore small particles on the ground…possibly needing to taste them to determine identity (again, only if this can be done without Mom yanking on said chain to stop the taste test).

7.  Must manage to outwit Mom at least once by disappearing for a sufficient quantity of time to make her heart thump and nerves explode, say by wandering off at the Dinoland playground area, cross over the bridge, and sit playing happily in the sand until she finds me (hey, don’t worry, it was an entirely closed in area….it’s not like I went out the exit part of the play ground and was truly lost!)

6.  Must attempt to splash in the water of “It’s a Small World”…or any other boat ride for that matter….”Jungle Cruise” can get the same reaction….prior to the harsh tone of “Noah!!”

5.  Must try to drag the “tail” of aforementioned leash into as much dirt and/or mud as possible, or step on it repeatedly, prior to Mom noticing this act and wrapping the tail over the head of poor “lamby” as I walk along.

4.  Important to always resist Mom’s attempt to have control of the said leash, though once she firmly establishes that she is the one who gets to hold that end, should drop the battle without a care in the world…and take off running.

3.  Must attempt to give every single Disney character in each and every parade a high-five, even if that means occasionally stepping off the curb (a definite Disney Parade no-no!) and enduring the reprimanding “N-o-a-h….”

2.  Must remain standing the entire bus ride to the airport, despite the repeated reminders to sit, blabberings about safety this or that, threats of losing life or limb, and/or attempts to knock me into a seated position by swiping my legs out from under me.

1.  And lastly, must without a doubt refuse to fall asleep on the plane ride home, jump over the back of the seats to play with grandpa, climb under seats to retrieve thrown toys, unclick seat belt 102 times (very fun), spill any drink within an 18 inch radius, and squeal as loudly and as often as possible.  This energy expenditure is worth falling asleep at 6 pm and sleeping in clothes and coat the rest of the night.  Thanks for the Disney trip, Mom.

Top Ten

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We had an office picnic this past week.  It was great – everybody came….all 6 of us!  I brought baby wipes (….okay….and desserts).  You can wipe down a picnic table with them.  You can wash your hands with them before eating.

What many people don’t know, and probably particularly people who do not have kids, is that baby wipes are golden.  They are strong.  They are moist. They can do just about anything.

So here’s my Top Ten List of what baby wipes can clean:

10.  Spills around the minivan cup-holders from mocha lattes (that are just necessary some days to survive after long nights)

9.  Food spills on the couch despite the rule of no food in the living room

8.  Sticky lollipop fingers compliments of the boys’ pediatric office (sugar-free of course)

7.  Dried green snot smeared over cheeks and nose, especially first thing in the morning

6.  Greasy hands from putting a bicycle chain back on….again…and again for the 3-year-old

5.  The dining room table after a meal of spaghetti (good for the floor too)

4.  Chocolate chips ground into the car seat of a 1-year-old who completely demolished a granola bar within a few minutes

3.  Puke on the carpet

2.  Pee on the carpet

1.  Poop on the carpet

(yep, all of that has been tested in private, home-based research, but repeating this research is not necessarily recommended)

What baby wipes can not clean:

10.  Nope – can’t think of a thing….

This is the reason why there is always a box of baby wipes in my car and several of them scattered around the house: third floor for the midnight diaper change; second floor bathroom to clean little behinds before they get into the tub; first floor living room/diaper changing area (we gave up on changing tables long ago…we just chase them around the living room!).

My mind has been spinning this week with “lists” of things related to parenting.  Don’t ask me why baby wipes was the first “list” on my mind, but stayed tuned this week for more lists coming :).

Why the term “mini-van” is a misnomer – it should really be called a “mini-home”

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It took me 6 months to deal with the fact that 3 car seats were not going to continue to fit snugly across the backseat of my SUV – 6 months and some splits in the door handle leather that kept getting squished each time I shoved the door closed.  Well, it only took about a month to realize that the 3-in-the-back situation never could work….because from the day we picked Seth up at the hospital, Micah and Noah were now within touching range of each other.  Every parent knows this is a deadly situation.

So, by the end of the year I said goodbye to my nice SUV (ahem…paid off….SUV), and stretched out into a luxurious new-to-me minivan.  And it happens to be on the upper end of luxury – but it was the only one on the lot the day I drove by and spotted it.  I think that was also the last day it was clean!

To me it really is more of a mini-mobile home (though a kitchen sure would be nice).  (It does have a potty – a plastic pop-up one which rests under one of the seats, but isn’t really ever used….because the kids are boys!)  The mobile home carries an odd assortment of items, not all of which are essential, but some are.

Here is my list of “must haves” for any transportation system (kids or not!):

  • Bottles of water – even though they warm up in the middle of summer and are not environmentally friendly, it’s at least once a week that one of the kids is dying of thirst and demanding a drink, even if home is 10 minutes away (and no, I won’t pull over to the side of the road to get one out of the back….every time).
  • A stroller – if you have a kid under 3, you better have at least an umbrella stroller in the back for the spur of the moment stops for fun, or you’ll regret it tomorrow.
  • Cell phone charger – this is most important on the weekends because I often hand my cell phone over to Micah when he wakes me up at 5:45.  He watches a movie and I turn over and sleep for an hour…but this drains the battery so it sometimes needs to be charged (he’s a better excuse than “I forgot to charge it” or “I played too many games of Scramble that it drained”)
  • Some money – I always have $20 stashed somewhere (not telling you where!).  I can’t tell you how often it has gotten me out of a jam (like showing up to dinner with friends and not having my wallet…or running to the store quickly, and …).  I’ve used it so often that I’ve developed a system to prompt me when I need to replace the money as well.  I’m just saying, if you don’t have this already – do it!!  Quarters don’t add up fast enough.
  • The most important thing in a vehicle, of course, is Baby Wipes (brand not important)!  It’s shocking how many uses there are for them – sticky fingers from the lollipop, mocha latte splattered onto the consol, dust on the dashboard, sticky drivers wheel, bits of granola bar ground into the car seat cloth, really just about everything….including a baby’s bum, amazingly enough!
  • And for uniqueness, my mobile home at this very moment contains half a plastic dolphin from a “happy meal” from our beach trip in June, a few spare clean diapers, an umbrella, 2 empty plastic water bottles, 4 one-third less plastic bottle tops from said water bottles scattered across the car, a half-eaten box of Honey Nut Cheerios (the other half appears to be on the floor), one Hot Wheels race car, several granola bar wrappers (oh yes, granola bars belong in the list of “must haves” because the 10-minute ride from day care to home in the evenings can become disastrous with hungry tummies!), the swimming bag, the “floatie” for Noah in the pool, an extra pair of Noah shoes (I just took out a pair of socks 2 days ago…), and the ever-present box of tissues (which can work in a pinch if you’ve run out of baby wipes!).
  • Finally, I think the best thing I’ve purchased is a plastic bucket for the back seat so that Micah has his own trash can.  I mean, how many 6-yr-old boys wouldn’t love their own trash can?  He loves it so much, he’d rather keep it clean and just throw the dirty tissues (yes, he has his own tissue box, too – I do not have elasta-arms!) on the floor!  But it really is the thought that counts.

What are your must-haves?

Don’t forget to laugh!

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As you might be able to tell by now, I like to think about parenting.  And one of my recent thoughts is how to inspire other parents who might be going through similar things.  It helps to know someone out there has also completely lost it over the kid splashing water outside of the bathtub.  I mean, what’s the big deal really?  It’s a bathroom.  Everything about a bathroom screams “get me wet, I can handle it!”  And yet, when my boys sit in the tub thrashing about or squirting streams of water droplets into the air, I have some mini-volcanic eruption about water hitting the water-proof tile floor (though I save my level 8.5 Richter Scale explosions for when they slide down the back of the tub sending a Tsunami reverberating back and over the edge…again….onto a water-proof floor!). My head shakes wondering why this “mess” is so offensive to me.

Today I was contemplating this in light of what a friend recently posted as her favorite “rules” of parenting (thanks AskDoctorG): “1. Love, 2. Limit, and 3. Let them be.”

1.  I sure do love my boys….though sometimes I show a little “less” love in the midst of discussing whether or not Micah will get dressed for daycare this morning (of course you will).  And sometimes I have to remind myself that part of how I show them love is in the small touches, so I tousle their hair (which is universally disliked by kids) and I pat their legs (which is typically greeted with an “ouch”), and give them “lovings” as Micah has coined it.  But sometimes I realize the true depth of my love when someone challenges my kid, like the woman who honked at Micah as he tried to steer his bike off a path at the playground this weekend – and the fiery dragon of protectiveness unleashed itself within me and roared at the open window about honking at a kid and being patient with a kid, and ….and….and….heart thumping emotional energy of love encircled my child as a shield. This reaction is not always rational, but it sure is powerful love.

2. Limits – ah, the splashing in the tub.  I do have very clear limits on “hurting another,” but I don’t know why I decide to “limit” other behaviors. Of course, it’s not always the “bad” things that I limit – sometimes it’s the good as well.  Sometimes it’s telling Micah that he’s had enough screen time.  Sometimes it’s saying no to a third or fourth “treat” even though you want to give in and make them happy (meanwhile, I fly past all normal limits of portion size for ice cream…on a routine basis).  And sometimes, as a friend and I discussed today, it’s even limiting the activities we do with our kids.  Just because they are old enough to do something (zipline, white-water rafting, waterpark slides) does not mean that we need to expose them to everything at once.  It is okay to have a completely unscheduled weekend….at least I think so…and we’ll have to try it some time.

3. And I definitely let the boys “be” if they’re being quiet…unless they are being too quiet…and every parent knows when that threshold is crossed!

But I decided today that I would add a 4th “rule” and that is: Laugh!  A statistic flashed by me recently that said a child laughs 400 times a day and an adult only 15.  This is sad indeed.  Clearly something has gone wrong – I need to laugh more.  And I need to remember to laugh more at the boys and with the boys.  So, when my sister decided to let 2-year-old Stephen run around naked for a few minutes after a bath yesterday to dry out his swimsuit-chaffed legs and said “it’s no problem as long as he doesn’t have to go potty,” guess what word Stephen heard in that sentence?  And guess who sprung out of range when he commenced to spraying the carpet.  Naturally, one day it will be a good idea to limit the location of his urination, but yesterday it was a good idea just to laugh.