The past few nights, Theo has taken a few toys to bed with him. Each night when he finally goes to sleep, we find the cars and plastic animals laying on their sides or their backs at the foot of his bed. Last night, he half-woke when Jeff tucked the blanket around him and noticed as Jeff absentmindedly turned one of the cars right side up.
“No, Daddy!” he said, suddenly awake. “They sleeping!”
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He was in his room the other day, playing quietly, “reading” his books. I heard a sudden sob and peeked into the room. He was sitting on the floor with a book in his hands, weeping. “What’s wrong, buddy?”
“I can’t read it!” he said, obviously frustrated.
“What do you mean?” He’d been happily thumbing through books, saying he was reading them, for weeks.
“I don’t know HOW!”
Well. Yes. That’s true.
For a long time, I’ve taken care of my to-do list on the weekdays. I grocery shopped, I made dentist appointments, I called the insurance company. I found a baby shower gift. I searched online for a recipe for that applesauce cake I was going to try to make. When weekends came, they were devoted to sleeping and eating waffles and having fun.
I anticipated the exhaustion I’d feel on weekday evenings after I started working, and it arrived right on schedule. By Thursday night last week my eyes were droopy at 6:30pm and Theo was singing his “Wake up, Mama!” song and reminding me that the sun wasn’t down yet. But I remembered that feeling, and I kind of sunk right back into it, my throat scratchy from talking all day and my feet hurting from wearing stiff shoes. For me, it’s a little of what accomplishment feels like. I like it.
But I’d forgotten about cramming the rest of my life into the weekends. Now we’re trying to do the fun stuff on Saturdays and Sundays – seeing friends and playing with cousins and going to the library and eating out – and then doing laundry and buying diapers and packing lunches after the kid goes to bed. No more lazy weekends for us.
I’m tempted to become a weekend hermit, holing up with my little guy and my big guy and eating Cheerios and watching America’s Funniest Home Videos for two days straight. In fact, I’m sure there will be weekends when that happens. However we’ll run out of cereal eventually so there will be a trip to the store on the agenda at some point.
Theo is just starting to grasp the ideas of time and place. He understands Now and Later and When and Where. This means he comes up with questions like, “Where I going, Mama?” just before we walk out the door, and replying “Not yet. I playing,” when I ask him if he’s ready for lunch. Every night before he goes to bed he asks, “Tomorrow a play day?” meaning he’s wondering if he’ll get to sleep in (a “play day”) or if I’ll rouse him out of bed to take him to day care. His attention span is expanding and he has been known to settle in with some cars or a book for twenty minutes at a time. Last night he grabbed my hand and led me into his room, asking me to “Play a game with me, Mama.” He also gets excited about taking his vitamins, and his latest favorite book is Olivia (“Read Livia to me, Daddy!”). I can’t wait to see what goofy new thing he does to make me laugh as I lift him out of bed after his nap – lately when I stick out my hand, he says, “I’m DeeDee,” to which I’m supposed to respond, “Nice to meet you, I’m DahDah.” Don’t ask me how that is supposed to make sense.
Every stage in his life is interesting to me, but now that the physical growth has slowed down a bit and his intellectual progress is faster, I am more fascinated by him than ever. He’s started making jokes, and remembering directions (“We going left?”), and trying to figure out what day it is (“Today Tuesday?”). Of course he’s also bossier than I ever imagined he could be, and he has a real problem remembering that everyone deserves a turn on the slide and that blocking it with his body and just hanging out at the top really isn’t acceptable playground behavior.
So isn’t it just my luck that, just when he’s at his most charming, I’ve up and got myself a full-time job? It’s true. I start next week. I’m excited about it. I’ve really missed the intellectual stimulation of working. I always liked my work and now that I’ve had a four year break, I know for sure that it really was the right field for me. So I’m going back.
Before I had a child I suspected I was not stay-at-home-mom material, and although I am beyond grateful that I could hang out with Theo for as long as I have, I still believe I’m happier when I’m working. I do not do well with unstructured days and hours alone with my toddler. I do not enjoy housework, and I just feel guilty that it’s not getting done while I’m trying to re-assemble a broken dump truck. I am terrible at arts and crafts. My patience for whining is severely limited.
Of course this new plan is kind of breaking my heart too. I am savoring our sleepy mornings this week, eating breakfast in our PJs and wandering over to the library and the park. I don’t like thinking about the post-nap cuddles I will miss, or the quiet weekday visits to the zoo.
But it still feels like the right thing. I’m happy with our child care situation. Jeff and I are both looking forward to caring for Theo in a more balanced partnership. And it’s a financially responsible decision for all of us.
But I’m not looking forward to giving up our play days either.
We used to tiptoe into Theo’s room after he fell asleep so we could watch him. Slumbering children are so beautiful and sweet that it was worth risking that his batlike sense of hearing would detect the turn of the doorknob as we stole into the room. If he stirred, Jeff would crouch below crib level and I hid behind the door before he saw us. If we were lucky, he would snorfle and turn his head away and close his eyes and we would scurry silently out of the room.
If he saw us, however, he immediately began to squeak and howl, begging to be picked up and cuddled and rocked. He pushed up onto his arms and bleated pathetically, and we would scurry from the room, listening for a few seconds until (hopefully) he forgot about us and fell back to sleep. Or else we had to go back in and pat his back and say soothing things and stroke his cheek with his stuffed giraffe and beg him to put his head back down. Which worked most of the time. But he obviously wasn’t happy that we were awake and available and watching American Idol and he was missing out on the fun.
But times are changing. When we go in his room now to listen to him breathe and see his peaceful face, he still wakes up sometimes. But he just squints at us and rolls over, as if to say, “Um, did you need something? Because I’m trying to get some sleep over here.”
It’s just another milestone that makes my brain scurry forward ten years to the day my pre-teenage son just wants to be LEFT ALONE with his iPod (or with the computer chip that has been injected into his inner ear that picks up radio signals or whatever we will be using to listen to music in 2019). I’m pretty sure he’s going to be the sort of person who sleeps until noon on Saturday mornings. But I like to think he might keep his special stuffed giraffe under his pillow even then.
I had one of those low-point parenting days yesterday. It wasn’t even an entirely bad day, it was just a really horrible thirty minutes, when I was trying to feed him dinner and he wanted to eat dinner but then he didn’t, and he was shrieking and I was shrieking and one of us swore at the other one and finally I just angrily unloaded the dishwasher while he wailed in the next room. And when I finally went in to make sure he was still as mad at me as I was at him, he was standing sadly in the dark dining room next to the wall, trying to wipe his nose with the Kleenex I’d stuffed in his jeans pocket earlier in the day. So of course that made me feel like someone should probably just take him away from me because who does that? Yells back at their toddler, and even swears in his general direction? But before I was declared an unfit mother I snuggled him in the rocking chair for a while, and whispered apologies into his hair, and then we read some library books.
There’s more to the story than that, of course. There’s me making an entirely-from-scratch chicken pot pie. There’s him spending the whole of his life up to now eating absolutely everything placed in front of him and then asking for more. There’s both of us hungry and just wanting to eat our freaking food. There’s him trying to tell me he wants MORE CHICKEN but then throwing the chicken across the room when I put it on the table. There’s me wondering when Jeff is going to come home, why can’t he come home sooner, the dinner will be burnt or cold and if I hadn’t tried to wait dinner for him then no one would be shrieking. And there’s me, wondering when I became a 1950’s housewife making dinner from scratch and then resenting everyone to whom I’m serving it.
I realize this is just the beginning of the toddler control freak era. I realize that he woke up yesterday morning and thought, whoa, let’s go to Burger King where I can have it MY WAY. I realize that I’m not the first person who ever lost her temper with her two-year-old. But even though it’s normal and I’m not the only one, it was a bad thirty minutes in a not-so-great day. Today was better.
Last year I worried that a five-minute video of Theo’s first year was too long. But this year I don’t care, and I made it over eight minutes long. Mostly because I suck at video editing and the software I was using made me want to cry. But also because my child is eight minutes’ worth of fascinating. I thought about ending it with a shot of myself pulling out my hair and hurling my laptop into a ravine in frustration, but then I remembered it’s not ALL about me.
Because I’m a day late for Theo Thursday. Here’s what he is doing right now: -Saying THEO HOLD IT when he wants to touch something, particularly garbage trucks on television commercials and expensive, fragile household items. Then becoming very angry when we explain why he can’t HOLD IT. -Yelling DADDY SLOW DONKEY when Jeff walks in the door, which apparently means that he wants a piggyback ride. But it sounds like something more insulting to me. -Crying when we wake him up and make him get dressed in the morning an hour earlier than he used to get up and eat breakfast in his pajamas. -Spending the entire Christmas season saying GOAT whenever he saw a reindeer. And now that Christmas is over he’s started saying REINDEER when we read farm animal books with goats in them. -Protesting as we walk up the steps to day care but then running into the kitchen and saying BYE MAMA as soon as he sees breakfast.
The Story Lady at my childhood library was white-haired and gentle. She looked like Mrs. Claus and gathered the kids around her at storytime each week. We all sat quietly in a semi-circle at her feet and looked adoringly upon her for a full thirty minutes, hanging on every word and picture in her many storybooks.
Actually, we probably ran around for fifteen minutes, screaming and hitting each other on the heads with the board books and knocking down the paperback book racks, but that’s not how I remember it.
Storytime at our local library is led by a young and energetic librarian who knows a million kids’ songs and finger games and walks around the room while she reads that week’s book. The kids run around and dance and learn how to jump and play under a parachute and drag out the plastic toy bucket at the end. There are name stickers and hand-stamps and bubbles.
Theo loves it and displays his adoration by applauding and, today, lying down on the floor with his feet crossed while the librarian led the songs. As though he thought it was a personal concert, just for him. I think I love it just as much as he does, because it makes me think of the Story Lady but also (and this is key) because I get my very own nametag sticker every week.
Well, right this very moment, he’s asleep. But besides sleeping, here’s what else he does:
-Says Mo Peez Mo Peez Mo Peez (More, please) over and over in a screechy whiny voice when he wants something. I’m trying to focus on the good manners but the delivery leaves much to be desired.
-Points to my leg and says Mama pants! and points to his leg and says Theo pants!
-Asks me to sing Wheels on the Bus when he is trying to delay naptime.
-Has a crush on Abby Cadabby from Sesame Street.
-Steals the rolling pin out of the kitchen cupboard, takes it into the living room, and lays down on his belly on top of it and rolls back and forth.
-Always wants broccoli for lunch.
-Whimpers No Loud? No Loud? every time I go near the KitchenAid mixer.