Morning mayhem
Attempting to get a toddler out the door
I had a productive week off last week. The past few posts turned into sprints before self-imposed deadlines, and life was not letting me cook the way I wanted to. Instead of going back to the well with another Baby Gear Mt. Rushmore, I decided to take a short break.
A lot changes in two weeks when you have two tiny dependents. We’re rocketing toward their springtime birthdays, with the toddler turning three and the baby celebrating her first within two weeks of each other. We asked the toddler if they could have a joint birthday party. She said yes. She also said that they should share presents, which is adorable but also a lie that we’re not going to test. She was firm, however, that they must have separate cakes. She can have whatever cake she wants, and the baby can enjoy her 1000th Kodiak Cake with smushed blueberries.
During this break, I also ran my first ever race, a 5K on St. Patrick’s day in abnormally beautiful weather. It felt good testing one of my New Year’s Resolutions and feeling like I gave something max physical effort, which I admittedly don’t do as often as I should with my solitary fitness routine. I beat my (emphasis on my) ambitious goal time by four seconds and am excited to measure my progress a few months from now.
At the risk of casting a spell upon my family for putting this into writing, I have to say that we’ve had a pretty good run of things over the past week. The baby’s top two teeth finally broke through, which means she is now housing solids and sleeping a little better at night. The toddler’s venture into her big girl bed has been a smashing success. We told her when she first moved from the crib that, if she ever woke up early, she could turn on her owl light and grab a book to read. But now she’s treating her books like her stuffies and tucking them under the covers. Some mornings, she wakes up with the cover of Grumpy Monkey imprinted on her face.
We’re beginning to enter a period I remember vividly from our first year with the toddler. One night, when she was a little younger than a year old, my wife and I were just sitting on the couch, messing around on our phones. And I recall thinking, “Oh my god. I’m actually bored.” We aren’t there yet, but we’re much closer to having the capacity for boredom than we were a month ago.
Hey, it feels good. I can’t wait to be really bored again. Until then (likely 17 years and one month from today), I will remain grateful for what we have and the progress that we’re making as a family.
So, with that very cheery update out of the way, I want to make the hardest right turn in the history of Father Times and address perhaps the most difficult and pertinent issue facing us right now.
Getting the toddler out the door.
The great escape
There is nothing more unpredictable than a toddler on a timeline.
I began writing this post on a Tuesday, one of the few days per week without an obligation to get the toddler out the door. On mornings like these, all is right. She wakes up sweetly, gives me a hug and a kiss, asks me a few questions, and heads downstairs without protest.
On this specific morning, the sun was shining through her window. It was a beautiful start to a beautiful day. She didn’t have any qualms with the breakfast selection. She was gentle with her baby sister. She was even gentle with the dog. Everything was flowing within the family rhythm we’ve worked so hard to manifest.
Tomorrow, I will take her to daycare. If history is any indication, tomorrow will not be like today.
Toddlers have the innate ability to sense parental urgency and rebel against it with the fury of a thousand suns. Your go time is their “no” time. If they suspect that you’re in a hurry, they start plotting to make you late.
My kid has a rudimentary understanding of time. She thinks “yesterday” means the past and “tomorrow” means the future. When you ask her how old adults are, she says 5. When you ask her long ago she was a baby, she says “5 days ago.” This rule applies to all timekeeping, until I tell her we have 20 minutes until we need to be out of the house. Then she turns into a goddamn Babylonian intricately measuring the angle of the light streaming through the kitchen to ensure that she waits at least 21 minutes before agreeing to do a single thing.
Then comes the reverse psychology. It used to be that every decision that needed to be made – what to eat, what clothes to wear, what shoes to put on, what to put in her hair – was an Opposite Day situation. I’d present two options, recommend the one I did not want her to pick, and she’d choose dada’s hidden preference. I am an adult with a psychology degree. She had no chance.
But recently she discovered that the world exists beyond pairs. She has the ability select things that she can and cannot see. And she’s learned the most dangerous word in the world: “neither.”
So once we move past “neither,” I normally just give in to the most diabolically mismatched set of clothes I’ve ever seen. Some days she looks like she just got back from a rave. Others the coal mine. I don’t really give a shit; I just want her to get in the car.
But clothes don’t magically appear on a defiant, 2-year-old nudist. I beg her to put on her clothes. She wants to play. It’s not time to play, it’s time to put clothes on. “Just shirt, no undies.” Not an option, although a gray area in Portland. “I want to put them on!” Okay, please put them on. “I NEED HELP PUTTING THEM ON!” I put them on.
We did it. We’re ready to go. All I need to do is get her down the steps to the car, but it’s like herding a mongoose. She takes a few steps and stops at a sprinkler. “What’s this?” “It’s a sprinkler.” “It’s broken.” “It’s not broken, it just isn’t on.”
A few more steps. She found some bird poop. “What’s this?” I say, “you know what that is, it’s bird poop, let’s keep going please.” She puts her finger in the bird poop and says “I put my finger in the bird poop.” I pick her up. She screams. She rips a leaf off a bush as we pass by. She screams again because the leaf ripped.
I put her in the car seat. She says she has to pee. But I’ve fallen for this stall tactic many times before, and I swore to never let it happen again. I say, “you can pee when we get there,” to which she replies, “I need to pee now.” I ignore her and pray. I ask her what song she wants to listen to. She says Up on the Housetop.
And with that, we listen to reindeer paws in late March to celebrate another successful morning of getting out the door.
Kid highlight of the week
The toddler drew this on her drawing pad this week.
I asked her what it was, and she said it was an “exercise van.” I asked her specifically what the two circular objects were, and she said those were the exercise, and that the long part was the van.
The scene on the left was “the wind blowing on the exercise van.”
I’m very proud of her.
Bringing it all back to me. Glad not to be struggling to get a toddler out of the house, but could use some strategies that work with young adults. The kind of boredom you may hanker after has not yet arrived for this parent.