A Dozen Lessons

Sure, they look innocent enough, stoic, even reaching for Walt Whitman and Shakespeare over "Bear in the Big Blue House" and "Clifford", just as any children of mine should. But, what a week!

A Dozen Things I’ve Learned This Week as a Mother
(and one positive bit)
1. They don’t make door knobs like they did in the 70’s. I remember using a paperclip as a kid to pop open a door when Steve would lock me out. Just unwind, push, turn, and pop! It’s open! Now, a person has to take off the entire door knob, find a piece of metal that is shaped like a flat head screw driver-but smaller-push it through the interior slot (without knocking the doorknob still in tact on the other side through the hole), turn with all your might, and then. . . POP! It’s open.
2. When you think you’ve punished your toddler so severely for locking all the door knobs on the inside, then shutting the doors, that he’ll never THINK to do it again, he’ll do it again. Just after you’ve put them all back together.
3. “X” says, “ksss” (according to the powers that be behind fridge phonics). And here, all these years as an English major, I thought it said, “zzzz” as in xylophone.
4. Six month old babies can talk back. You might not understand a word they say, but you know it’s ugly.
5. If, after putting the baby to sleep, you decide to relax for a few minutes by running a huge bubble bath, bubbles up to your chin, drinking a cup of coffee, and reading a great novel, like the Nobel Prize winning author Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s A Hundred Years of Solitude, and your toddler tries to catch all the bubbles in your tub to blow them back at you, and you think to yourself, “He’ll probably fall in. It’s really slippery, and that’s a long reach,” he will. Fall in, that is. Head first, fully clothed, and with a poopy diaper.
6. Even if you aren’t quite yet 30, flipping, tossing, squatting, carrying, twirling, and otherwise horse playing with your twenty-something pound children will not only put you in great shape, it’ll throw out your shoulder.
7. Scary sounds and scary people aren’t as scary if you wave “good-bye” to them.
8. If it’s dark, your husband is gone, you hear loud pounding noises, and you think someone is breaking in, don’t grab a weapon. It’s most likely your son whose locked himself in a room this time, and is trying to pound his way out with a plastic duck.
9. Peas can be spit further than squash.
10. If you want the soundtrack of your life to sound more like a horror movie starring crazed dolls with machetes, let the batteries run down on all the toys. You’ll get “The Intzy Weenzy Spider”, “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star”, and “Rubber Duckie, You’re the One,” all playing at once, very low and slow. It’ll be just like your bad dreams from the night before never ended when the music begins to play before your first cup of coffee. It’s magical.
11. Even if you call it “juice”, water it down, put it in their favorite cup with a twisty straw, and say that everybody loves it, V-8 is still a vegetable at which to be scowled and refused.
12. You think you’re doing things right, though you wonder, when you see your toddler making his stuffed monkey sign, “Yes, Ma’am” after being told to repent for some unthinkable unape-ish infraction.
Ohhh, what a week. . .
The Positive Bit: There’s no day that a glass of “Mommy Juice”, a huge plate of nachos, and Bernie Mac at 7:30 can’t make better.