Sorry, kids, but a helmet a day keeps Mommy's night terrors away

This post is going to start with a simple request. Will everyone please stop trying to scare the living poo out of me?

I just finished reading a blog post about car safety and children that might as well have been titled "The 10 Ways You Might Die Today and Other Fun Factoids." In this post, the author explained that, if I have anything lying loose in my car, it will become shrapnel in the case of an accident, with CDs turning into ninja throwing stars and earbuds becoming garrotes. And as I sit here basking in the article's afterglow, which has rendered me clammy and pale, I’m faced with the certainty that the umbrella that’s in my floor board will automatically deploy itself and impale us all if we ever again venture down the driveway.

But this isn’t an isolated incident. It seems like every day, my Facebook newsfeed, email homepage, DVR, and Twitter account (I should really get outside more) are all loaded up with warnings about the dangers that face my children if I dare to let them out of their beds in the morning. As someone who’s diagnosed herself with three types of terminal cancer and a flesh-eating virus this year alone, I really don’t need your help to not sleep at night. (But, hear me now, one of these times, I’m gonna be right, and on that day, my tombstone will feature a solar-powered version of the GIF below and an inscription reading, “I told y’all!”)

Anyway…………

I’ve absolutely reached my threshold for mom panic. Just today I caught the tail end of some show that I should have known not to watch because it was called “America Now,” and nothing good can come from dwelling on American now, but it was naptime, and the remote was all the way on the other side of the couch.

So, Bill Rancic (who apparently anchors the fake news now) comes on to introduce a segment about toddlers and sippy cups, and my spidey-senses start tingling because my toddler uses a sippy cup — what do, Bill?

Well according to a lady dressed in scrubs with unverified credentials, I’m not supposed to give Molly a sippy cup after the age of 1 (epic fail) because she may walk around with it and fall. Long (and horrifying) segment short, best case scenario, it will become lodged in the roof of her mouth until the end of days; worst case, they’ll have to surgically remove her front teeth through her nostrils. Admittedly, they didn’t say it so graphically or really even mention the nostrils thing, but they didn’t have to; I could tell that’s where they were headed.  

Instead, she’s supposed to already be using a lidless cup, only while seated at the table during mealtime. Shhheeee-iiiiittttt...next you’re gonna tell me that I shouldn’t let her use a steak knife or eat little pieces of her napkin. Back off, Nanny 911; this is the real world.

Now, some of you may already be following the no-sippy initiative, and kudos to you if you do. The lady in scrubs is definitely a fan. But Molly is on the go too much for me to strap her down every time she needs a drink, so the only reasonable solution was for me to invent this (patent-pending):

On to over-the-top example, part deux.

Do you know what can ruin a beach vacation faster than Sutton’s Borat impression?

Reading an article link about dry drowning on your second day there, that’s what. This situation was made far worse by the fact that Molly likes to eat pool water (panic-inducing habit #234). After each chlorine craving, she would come up spluttering like a politician, which led me to spend every night of our so-called vacation watching her sleep Edward Cullen-style. What’s worse, when she woke up in the middle of the night, as she is sometimes wont to do, I was forced to wave my hands in front of my face while saying, “Doodloo-doodloo-doodloo…This is all a dream” in my best Wayne Campbell voice. It was humiliating.

Even now, three months later, if she chokes on her apple juice or splashes too vigorously in the tub, I feel obligated to place a 24-hour ban on lying horizontal.

Nope, there’s no way to win. The world is a minefield, and unless I plan on my children living here forever (which is sooooo not happening), I’m going to have to face the truth that I can’t protect them from everything and, just like I have to pick my battles, I have to pick my worries as well. Otherwise, I can go ahead and add heart attack to my list of self-diagnoses and finally be right for once. (Psych…it was just gas.)

Sibling love: If Suttie doesn't make it, can I have his bath toys?

Right now, right in this moment, my children love each other. I mean truly, deeply care about each other, and although they fight over juice pouches and Angry Birds and the sweet spot on the couch and car headphones, there is a genuine affection between them that trumps all of that. In fact, as I’m writing, Molly is leaning over Suttie as he plays the iPad and he’s just reached up and patted her gently on the head. Of course, she’s followed that up by swatting his hand, but she only did it at half strength, which, coming from Molly, is a real gesture of love.

Case in point, last Saturday was Suttie’s first fall t-ball game and, t-ball being t-ball and four year olds being four year olds, the parents and fans spent the entire game yelling instructions like, “Run to first! No, not that way! The other way! Toward the coach! Oh My God!” or “Quit digging at your bottom and watch the ball, son!”

Now, Suttie, he’s a cool kid, but he has got to be the slowest runner in the history of t-ball. Something happens to him when he’s out on that field that makes him think it’s okay to get half way to first and then robot walk the rest of the way or practice his Gangnam Style dance moves along the path to second or throw his arms straight behind him in a failed attempt at aerodynamics that only puts him awkwardly off balance. So his dad and I spend most of the games shouting at him to “run fast” and “stop dancing” and “be normal.” Last Saturday’s opening grudge-match was no different.

But as we yelled at him to run faster, Molly became increasingly upset, and I could only imagine the direction of her thoughts: “What’s he running from? Zombies? Ghosts? Ghost zombies? If he’s gone, then there won’t be any half-eaten Poptarts lying around for me to swipe. Noooooooooo!!!!!!!!”

This process repeated every time Suttie had to run: parents yelling, Molly looking worried and crying, Grandma taking Molly away from the field, Molly trying to run away from Grandma. By the end of the game, she was pretty traumatized, and that’s when I witnessed the sweetest exchange between my son and daughter. Suttie had gone to meet the rest of his team under a tree for post-game snacks (the main reason for playing) and Molly toddled up to him, gave him a concerned, searching look, then wrapped her chubby arms around him and just held on. And after a beat, he did the same.

In that moment, I felt immense pride, not because his team won the game or because Suttie made an amazing play by stopping a hard-hit line drive (although I am proud enough to mention it here). I was proud because these two kids, my kids, were embodying everything that we’re trying to teach them about family and sibling devotion.

And this would be an ideal point to end this blog post. But I’ve never been accused of brevity, and it’s really not the end of the story anyway.  Yes, my children showed a sincere love for one another on that baseball field, but they still fight and show jealousy and get hurt feelings just like any other brother and sister pair. But now I have something to cling to in those exasperating moments. When they can’t stand to be in the same room with each other, when tattling reaches an unbearable high, when they accuse us of being unfair and playing favorites, when Molly has a crush on every one of Suttie’s friends and it aggravates him (and his father) to the core, I can think back to that baseball field and know that, foundationally, they love each other and won’t travel through this life alone.

Of course, there’s no guarantee that they’ll stay close as they age. I’ve seen it too often, siblings who once played innocently together growing into relationships that are rife with animosity and resentment. I think they’re safe from Cain and Abel’s fates, but I want more for them than holiday dinners and birthday phone calls. 

So, our task begins. Balancing an awareness and acceptance that they will fight, they will even bemoan the other’s existence, while reminding them of their lifelong bond and their joint obligation to pay for our luxury nursing home. Because, if worse comes to worst, as their parents, we’re more than happy to give them a shared enemy if it means that they face it together.

Are those stirrup pants because this sure feels like Nineteen Eighty-Four?

A while back, I saw a friend at the Babies R Us/Toys R Us customer service desk as she was returning a broken baby monitor and I was seeking a price adjustment on an overcharge at the register (by the way, kudos on your business operations, Mistakes R Us). And it got me thinking: how long is too long to “monitor” your child?

When we had Suttie, affordable video monitors had just come out, and I was in love. What’s that sound? Is someone trying to kidnap my baby [through a locked window on the second floor]? Nope, it’s just the little dude gnawing his crib rail into oblivion. Breathe, momma.

Or…did I just hear the dog jump five feet into the air and land in the crib, being now moments away from smothering our son? Oh, no, that was just Suttie dropping his glow worm onto the floor in an act of bedtime rebellion. Thank you, Summer Infant, because if I’d gone up to check, the sleepless vigilante would think he’d won and we’d be playing with the shape sorter at 2 am.

And I will never forget the moment when the baby monitor truly proved it’s worth. Suttie was somewhere between 18 months and 2 years (I said I’d never forget the moment, not every freakin’ detail), and after my husband checked the screen one evening after bedtime, he nonchalantly walked out of our bedroom and did double steps up the stairs. What I didn’t know is that he had seen that our son’s crib was…EMPTY! Like Easter Sunday tomb, your bank account after responding to that Nigerian prince…EMPTY! Thankfully, he opened Suttie’s door to find our smiling toddler running toward him, so proud of himself for mastering the over-the-side, use-your-tummy-for-leverage crib escape.

But when we had Molly, we moved Suttie’s video monitor from his room to hers simply because we didn’t want to buy another one. Thankfully, Suttie still thinks that Big Brother is watching him and if any of you narcs tells him differently, you can expect repercussions that would make John Gotti blush.

So now that I have no way to look in on what my four year old is up to during his bedroom hours, I’m definitely missing my powers of surveillance. Yet, if we had purchased a second monitor, when would I stop? At 6? At 10? At 18? Yeah, 18 sounds good.

But then I think of the horrors of checking in on my adolescent son because there are just some things that not even a mother needs or wants to see. And I’m not talking about picking his nose or his bottom because he would do either of those on the 6 o’clock news. No, there’s plenty that he needs to figure out on his own without his mother yelling:

“Suttie, you’re gonna go blind…”

Or his father calling out:

“Son, that move works better from behind; you’re gonna pull something!”

I know. Sutton’s disgusting.

No, it was the right move to take down the camera and give the boy some privacy, even in the age of helicopter parenting and s-mothering. And in two or three years, I’ll have to force myself to do the same for my second born because it’ll be a lot more fun to escort her into school with my rear (at least most of it…okay, some of it) squeezed into the mini-skirt that I found hidden in her backpack than it would be to prevent the indiscretion in the first place. 

You kids and your twerking bears....

I’m gonna start this post by saying that, yes, I watched the VMAs and, yes, I know that I’m thirty years old and, yes, I know that you are way too grown up for that (despite your lingering obsession with Twilight), but I’m about forty years away from filling up my DVR with reruns of NOVA, so in the mean time, I’ll cringe along with the rest of the cool kids.

And cringe I did. Because even though I still enjoy watching the antics of Generation Whippersnapper, I am in my third earthly decade, and there’s a lot that I simply don’t understand about kids these days. For example, teddy bears. When I was an adolescent, if you still carried around a teddy bear, you were vilified as a “baby,” but apparently these days you can tote Mr. Cuddleface around with you until you die as long as you’re grinding on him.

And who knew that foam fingers could be so evocative. This whole time, we’ve been wasting them at sporting events (WASTING!), when what we really should have been doing is tying our hair into tiny giraffe horns and using them to spank Jason Seaver’s married son.

Now, I’m all for artistic expression and experimentation, but I’m too old to understand the merit in pointless raunchiness. However, I do see the danger in it. My son’s first crush was Hannah Montana. He was only a year and half old, but when the first hints of “You get the limo out front…” came on the TV, he was mesmerized. He literally could not look away from her blonde wig and sparkly scarves. And I shudder to think that he would not have been able to look away from the same girl’s gyrations and crotch thrusts if I’d been daft enough to let him watch MTV.

And, Molly! Oh lord, my sweet baby girl. I can only imagine her as an impressionable thirteen year old watching her idol on TV and wanting to emulate every tongue extension and twerk. Because when you start as a tween queen, your fan base at 20 will still largely be made up of little girls. And despite your best attempts to prove your womanhood and of-ageness, a display like what I saw on Sunday night only affirms your status as a misguided child.

Which makes me incredibly sad because it shows that there has been no real direction in your life, that all the fame, money, praise has led to nowhere but delusion and an I-can-do-no-wrong mindset. So I guess I owe Miley Cyrus a huge thank you, for reminding me of the job that I have ahead of me. That it will take serious effort and persistence to raise self-aware, responsible, reasonable children and to help them transition into respectable adults.

And they will stumble, they will twerk (actually, I’m really hoping that Suttie won’t twerk, but I’m sure he’ll do some crotch thrusts along the way), they will act out and dress poorly, but God help me if I let them do it on an international stage. And there’s no way in heaven or hell that I’m going to sit idly by and applaud them for it. No, I’ll simply be waiting at home with a switch.

What's your policy on returning books that smell?

So have you seen that Luvs commercial with the mom in the restaurant who, after having kid #1, looks all haggard and on the edge of a nervous breakdown, but after having kid #2, she’s got it all together with showered hair and an “I am woman, see me nurse” attitude? (Here’s the youtube playback in case you’ve been living in a doomsday shelter: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZgmbJso-2-o). Well, I find the whole thing irresponsibly misleading.

Not the breastfeeding part. I could care less about that. If you feel comfortable enough to nurse in public, great, whatever. I didn’t…equally great, whatever. What I have a problem with is the idea that you’re supposed to have this whole mothering in public thing down as soon as kid #2 starts crowning. (And also that you’d be asking someone to look away from your rack because, honestly, after kid #2, business is slow.)

Like this well-composed matron, I too took my children to a restaurant by myself once. And I will never, EVER, do that shit again.

First of all, the coloring sheet that they gave Suttie kept him occupied for all of 18 seconds. Like, wham, bam, I’ve scratched two blue lines across this thing, and now I’m ready to party. Maybe it would have helped if the coloring sheet featured a more engaging character than a dancing piece of toast, but, truthfully, probably not.

So, I did what any reasonable parent in the 21^st century would have done when you’ve got a 1 year old trying to use the salt and pepper shakers like binoculars; I gave him my phone to play with. And it still surprises me the looks I get when people of a certain age see my four year old playing on my iPhone. But listen, folks, if you knew it was about meltdown thirty and you could only entertain one of your children until the food arrived, you’d be handing over your Jitterbug as well.

And once the food did arrive, that’s when the real fun started. After her first bite, Molly dropped her sippy cup and since that was such a laugh riot among the other guests, she proceeded to drop every bit of food that she had, leaving me to loosely apply the five-second rule so that she wouldn’t starve. Meanwhile, Suttie spilled his juice on my untouched sandwich, so my meal consisted of shards of mum-mum crackers that were spread across the table and, I’m not proud to say it, some free-floating fruit snacks that I found near the bottom of my purse.

And as we muddled through, with me having to get down on the food-covered floor every few seconds to search for paci, sippy, and food chunks covered in the least amount of hair, nearby patrons looked on (because, in those moments, who doesn’t want an audience?) and said asinine things like, “Oh, I remember those days.”  Do you, now? Well, do you also remember how awkward it was to have someone stare at you through those less-Walton moments? Quick! Turn around! There’s an elderly woman over there struggling to free her cane from the table legs and you’re totally missing it!

And that poor waitress. She could just tell that I was gonna leave all that mess on the floor…because I made a hand motion around the bottom of our table and mouthed “I’M SORRY.”

But it’s not just in restaurants where our kids can show the world how frazzled second-, third-, and fourth-time mothers can still be (fifth-time moms, you should really have your shit together by now). Today’s visit to the library was a prime example. I’ve been meaning to take the kids to the library all summer, but something always seemed to get in the way…swim lessons, endless errands, my night terrors of them ripping books apart with their teeth. But with only five days left before the end of summer, I’ve been trying to cram in all of the outings that I’ve previously avoided in the hopes that, when Suttie looks back at the pictures, he’ll think we rocked it from June all the way to August.  (We have a similar plan for Disney. I’ve just got to put the finishing touches on my Mickey and Goofy cut-outs and then…Voila! Their memories might say they’ve never been to the house of mouse, but these pictures of them next to a plywood Donald sure as hell do!)

Now, I should have known it wasn’t going to be a good day to visit a quiet, peaceful space. Earlier, coming back in from the porch, I clocked Molly straight on her forehead with the front door. And after she stopped screaming, I said, “And that’s why we watch where we’re walking,” to deflect some of my guilt. Needless to say, she was already in a special mood.

As soon as we walked into the library, Suttie took off for the computers because apparently we live in a primitive cave dwelling without electricity or running water the way he was charging at those screens. But this was a problem because he can’t work the computers by himself, and Molly’s 30-second stroller ride into the library was 15 seconds too long, as she was already contorting herself out of the straps and sputtering something like, “Release these chains, dark villain!”

So, I did the unthinkable, the unbelievable, the nearly unspeakable. I let her out. And while I was trying to help Suttie reset the computer’s language from Spanish to English because it takes a preschooler only 10 seconds to change the system’s fundamental setup, Molly had found her way over to a quiet study group in the corner and was trying to pull books out of one of the members’ backpacks without her noticing (which I have to say was pretty impressive…until she slammed one down on the floor and cackle laughed. If she could have held it together, we’d have ourselves a new ebay auction about now.)

After retrieving Pick-Pockets O’Neal, we sought out our borrowings. And I now know that it is impossible for a four year old to not pull books from the library shelves. Before we even left the car, I painstakingly reminded Suttie of the library’s dos and don’ts. Do be quiet. Don’t put your mouth on things. Do have fun. Don’t have so much fun that I have to beat you. One of those don’ts was don’t pull books from the shelves because we’ll never get them back in the right spots and the librarians will come to our house while you sleep and cut up your library card and then put a curse on our whole family (it’s important for kids to face real consequences).

But he physically couldn’t do it. And not for lack of trying. It was like Peter Pettigrew’s silver hand in Harry Potter. He didn’t want to pull them down and he fought against it, but the magnetic force between his fingers and those bindings was like something out of Star Wars. It scared us all.

So armed with at least fifteen books (because, rather than admit that I let my kid pull a bunch of books down that we didn’t want or need, I just played it cool like, “Yeah, we meant to get this book of Alabama roadmaps. Who doesn’t use paper maps these days?”), we went to check out, and about five steps from the checkout desk, Molly spat three large drops of some unidentified, half-digested liquid onto the carpeted floor. And there I was…with nothing. No wipes, no burpcloth, no rag…just me, a stroller full of books, a toddler writhing in my arms, and a kid walking next to me asking if they give out suckers. So I did what any reasonable mother would do, I looked around to see if anyone had noticed the vomitus incident and then I stepped over it. Because sometimes that’s all you can do – leave your crumbs (or bile) on the floor and shame-facedly speed walk out of there.

And I dare Mama Luvs to say she would have done anything differently because what they didn’t show at the end of that charming commercial was her acid-reluxing baby pull off the boob and spew curdled milk all over her well-ironed blouse while child #1 took a leak in the decorative fern. Oh, kids, we laugh, so that we don’t cry.