Going for a hike on a brisk day, I asked my then four-year-old if he wanted his sweatshirt. “No!” he insisted. Nonetheless, I was going to be the responsible mom and bring it along anyway. Just in case.
Arriving at the hiking trail, he climbed out of his car seat and declared, “I’m coooold! So cold!”
Going to look for the sweatshirt, my smile dropped off my face. Nope, not there. Not there either. Crap, I forgot it.
Want to build connection at bedtime? Here are the two bedtime questions we discuss every night with our kids.
“Two minutes left!” I say to my five-year-old as he gets ready for bed. He is not going to be ready in two minutes. We’ll be down to one bedtime book tonight instead of two. But no matter how late he is, there’s one part of his bedtime routine we never skip.
We call it “favorite things,” but it’s a bit more complicated than that. Rather, it’s a nightly conversation framed by two core questions.
Dripping sweat, I staggered in the door after my Sunday afternoon run, only to hear my two-year-old wailing “Mammmmmaaaaaaaa!”
“What happened?” I asked my husband, who I found standing outside the bathroom. I peered in to see my son sitting on the potty, his face red and damp. “He hasn’t been like this since he woke up, has he?”
I recalled some of my last words as I headed out the door: “Make sure you wake up [Little Bird].”
My husband winced. “Well, he didn’t want me to get him out of bed. And then he didn’t want to go on the potty. Then he refused to let me help him off the potty. Then he didn’t want me in the room at all.”
Walking into the bathroom, I sighed, leaned down and helped my son off the potty. After pulling up his pants and helping him wash his hands, I picked him up. HIs small arms wrapped around my neck while mine embraced him. My sweat dampened his shirt as his small face pressed into my shoulder. His crying slowed and finally subsided.
Guilt pierced me. So did anger.
“Can’t I be gone for just a half-hour?” I thought. “But maybe not. Maybe I shouldn’t.”
A five-year-old boy sits at a picnic table, wailing. A Junior Ranger workbook lies in front of him, open to an I Spy activity. One animal is circled, then crossed-out, then circled again. Through tears, he keeps repeating, “I can’t erase it!”
Almost 30 years earlier, a toddler girl sat on the floor, struggling to shove a block into the wrong hole in a shape sorter. Fed up with the whole thing, she chucked it across the room.
The first was my son on a camping trip a few weekends ago. The second was me as a kid. I don’t remember it happening, but my mom has told the shape sorter story over and over again. The frustrated apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.
Stay right, stay right!” I yell. Pedaling behind him, I watch my five-year-old wobble down the pavement on his bike. While he’s put in hours of practice at the nearby park, this is his first time on the road.
Despite my urgent tone, my heart is calm. He follows my directions, moving right when asked and braking on cue. At stop signs, he stops feet before the line. He even yells, “Stop!” to warn me. Despite the wobbly shoulders, it’s as if he’s done this a million times before.
This was a vast contrast to a year ago.
A white plastic ball. A red and blue t-ball stand. A a diminutive kid holding a large, yellow plastic bat.
Watching this scene play out at the playground with my two-year-old son, I tried not to interfere. After all, I thought, he should try it on his own. That is, until he started poking the ball with the narrow end of the bat. Poking it!
I walked over and tried to adjust his hands into the right position. “Look, you swing the bat!” I insisted.
And because my children are nothing of not their own people, he insisted right back.
“Don’t worry, I’m being careful!” my five-year-old said as he tried to pick up a piece of broken glass off the kitchen floor with his bare hands.
Twitching a few times before getting the words out, I said, “No, stop, don’t pick it up! With some things it doesn’t matter how careful you are – they aren’t safe.”
I wouldn’t recommend anyone pick up broken glass with their bare hands. But his comment made me stop and think.
“That is a noise a guitar should never make.” I wince as my five-year-old scratches the strings of my acoustic guitar again. “Seriously, knock it off.”
He switches to strumming. The out-of-tune notes combine together in a way that’s the opposite of harmonic.
“It sounds beautiful!” he proclaims.
“Uh, it really doesn’t,” I respond. “It really needs to be tuned.”
My two-year-old squeaks, “Tune!” and grabs the knobs on the top of the guitar’s neck, turning them wildly. So much for getting it more, rather than less, in tune.
As much as this entire process pains me, I keep getting the guitar out.
I never thought I’d be so happy about having a bookshelf with actual books on it. I haven’t seen this sight for more than four years.
These books have been in hiding – shoved under my nightstand, stacked up on the bottom shelf of an end table. There’s nothing wrong with these exact books. It’s the very act of placing them on a bookshelf and trusting that they’ll stay there that’s revelatory.
While books don’t jump off shelves, they do end up on the floor when a toddler pulls them down with his sticky, wet little fingers.
I never thought the image of defeated motherhood would have two wheels. But many things surprise you as a mom.
My beloved bicycle has accompanied me over thousands of miles of riding. Currently, its back wheel is decidedly non-functional. If I pumped it up to its full pressure or God forbid, rode on it, the whole thing would burst like an overinflated balloon. Even more importantly, the bike’s chain is twisted to heck. I would crash with the first push of the pedal.
My bike isn’t normally in this state. In fact, it’s like this because of a promise I made. A few weeks ago, I promised my five-year-old that we would go for his first “big kid bike ride.” While he’s biked endless loops around the playground, this would be the first time we’d go on a multi-use trail together, both of us on our individual bikes.
But something blocked my way.