Baby's First F-Bomb

My four year old just screamed the "F" word. Yeah, the four-letter one that rhymes with "duck."

She likes to experiment with sounds, start words with different letters, and basically just play with language. Today she's been coming up with words that rhyme with "Lucky" (one of our cats). Just a few minutes ago, I hear something along the lines of: "Lucky, pucky, ducky, mucky...luck, suck, nuck...FUCK" (yeah, she kinda yelled it).

I don't want to make a big deal out of it; I don't want it to become something she does to push my buttons (she's really good at that). I also don't want her dropping F-bombs. So I told her that when that sound starts with an "F," it makes a word that's not nice and I don't want to hear her say it again. Fingers crossed that that's it and I don't hear it again until after she hits puberty and decides she hates me.

Enfant Terrible

For two days last week, my 4-year-old was insanely disruptive during quiet time at school (the kids don't have to sleep, but they do have to rest quietly). Wednesday, she was screaming. Not crying-screaming, screaming as loudly and shrilly as possible and then laughing when everyone covered their ears. If someone asked (or told) her to stop, she'd laugh and do it again. Oh, and she was hitting other kids. Also, at some point during all this, she somehow got ahold of a pair of scissors and was snipping them at a classmate. I had to pick her up early.

Some background: my daughter is a peer model in a special needs preschool class. This means that she is NOT special needs herself (every time I tell someone about her class, they're all like "oh, so she's delayed or something?" NO! She's too damn smart for her own good. No, YOU'RE being defensive.) Being a peer model means that she's there to set the developmental bar for the kids with delays. Except that with this recent behavior, the teachers are having to spend more time and energy dealing with her than working with the kids who actually have IEP's (Individual Education Plans). Which means that she needs to get it together soon or she's going to be dismissed from the class, and how bad does that sound?

"It all started when she got kicked out of special-needs preschool, it was a downward spiral after that. She started smoking, knocked over liquor store and killed a man. Yeah, she's the youngest felon ever."

No, YOU'RE overreacting.

So it was pretty much the same thing on Thursday. I had to leave class early to go pick her up because she was out of control. When we got home, I took away all of her toys. All of them. I left her books, that's it (because, you know, literacy). No stuffed animals, no puzzles, no dress-up clothes, no musical instruments, etc. For each day that she listens and behaves, she gets one toy back. If she has a bad day, those toys go right back in the closet. No more Miss Nice Mommy.

On Friday, she was an angel. Coincidence?

Clog

So after the Baby Alive poopfest (see previous post), I made the mistake of leaving a package of baby wipes in the bathroom. I'm constantly bitching at my daughter for using too much toilet paper. Can you guess where this is going?

Dingdingding, we have a winner! She decided to use wipes instead of tp and, of course, used too many. I've been able to get away with flushing one or two wipes in the past, but when a good quarter of the package goes into the S-bend, it can create some drainage problems.

It backed up Tuesday night, and I (not realizing what was causing the clog) tried plunging it. That seemed to work, so I went to bed without giving it another thought. When I flushed it Wednesday morning, it almost overflowed. Again with the not-what-I-wanted-to-deal-with-first-thing-in-the-morning. Of course, with her potty chair gone and the toilet filled to the brim with raw sewage, the girl had to hold her morning pee until she got to school. She actually made it without having an accident. Yay for small victories.

Meanwhile, back in the toilet bowl, things were draining slowly and finally reached a point that made plunging possible. Unfortunately, my toilet and my plunger don't get along very well. They just don't fit together, and the lack of a firm seal means things can get messy. I'll leave it at that.

I still tried (very carefully) to plunge it for about an hour before admitting defeat. Since it says in my lease that my landlord is not responsible for damage/maintenance emergencies caused by tenants, I started searching plumbers online, hoping to find a bargain price and wondering how the hell I was going to pay for even a bargain price (because, you know, welfare). My friend The Physicist had sent me a facebook message asking how my morning was going, and I shared all the shitty details of my situation with him (ha, see what I did there? Hardy har har.) He offered to come over after work (doing physics stuff, of course) and snake my toilet. I graciously accepted his offer.

When he got there, he tried plunging it himself, because with me not being a physicist or an engineer (did I mention he's technically a mechanical engineer? He just works in the physics department at the university), I was probably doing it wrong. When that didn't work, he tried the snake. When that didn't work, we made a run to Home Depot and he bought a toilet auger. Within a minute or so of working with the auger, he pulled up a clump of wipes that was about as big as my fist, successfully unclogging my toilet. For now.

Baby Alive

Last Monday morning I was awoken by my four year old laying her baby doll on the bed next to me an hour before the alarm was set to go off, saying "Mommy, Baby Alive pooped in her diaper." Baby Alive was a Christmas gift from her great grandmother this past year, and my daughter is in love with it. She is especially in love with the fact that she can give the baby water in a tiny sippy cup and the doll then wets her diaper. She has also become obsessed with anything diaper-related, and that means both forms of human waste.

My first thought when she did this was, Why do I smell real poop? Oh, no. She had pooped in her potty chair and put her own (very real) poop in the doll's diaper. Totally not something I wanted to deal with first thing on a Monday morning, especially when I was supposed to have a full hour more of sleep. I ripped the girl a new one. I think I may have lectured her for a full hour straight, taking short breaks when the smell got to be too much for me. I also gave her potty chair to her two year old cousin and took away all of her baby dolls and accessories. Then I lectured her some more and told her grandma (my mom) the whole story while lecturing her still more, just in case she didn't get the message that what she did was Really. Really. Gross.

Still, I'm a sucker. As much as I wanted to be a hardass and throw the thing directly in the garbage, I couldn't do it.

I wiped the poop off the surface of the doll, scrubbed it, and flushed the fluid tract with disinfectant in an attempt to save it because it was a gift from my grandma (her great grandma). That didn't work. I swallowed my sentimentality and put the doll in the trash can. Luckily I'd just taken the trash out and it was a clean bag, because it wasn't long before I rescued the poor thing, whose only crime was having a poo-obsessed preschooler for an owner. It is now soaking in a five-gallon bucket of oxiclean solution mixed to saturation point. I have no idea what I'll do if that doesn't work. I'll keep you posted.

Broccoli vs. Trees

I used to read articles by parents who struggled to get their kids to eat vegetables and think, “You’re doing it wrong!” I, in my infinite wisdom, knew better than them. The trick is early and frequent exposure; everyone knows that! Silly parents, I thought, get with the program.

Then my veggie-eater decided she didn’t like broccoli.

Broccoli is one of my personal favorites. I like it raw, plain, dipped in dressing, steamed, smothered with cheese, stir-fried, baked on pizza…I could go on. My daughter shared my love of broccoli until she was three and a half. One evening at the dinner table, she looked at her bowl of pasta-with-uber-veggie-sauce and spoke four words I never thought I'd hear from her: “I don’t like broccoli!”

I was stunned. I insisted she eat it anyway; of course she liked broccoli, she’d always liked it. This resulted in a battle of wills (for anyone who has never entered a battle of wills with a preschooler, it's like arguing with a brick wall...one that can scream and throw things).

I’d heard many times the tip of calling broccoli “tiny trees” to trick kids into wanting to eat it. I was horrified by the idea of lying to my child; I also flat-out refused to call anything by an incorrect name. Broccoli is broccoli, it is delicious, she’d always eaten it before and she WILL eat it again, I stubbornly thought to myself. I continued to serve it every day, prepared differently each time but still calling it broccoli. She continued to refuse to eat it.

After a while I gave up. I stopped serving it. I bemoaned my failure as a parent. I had several more people suggest the “call-it-tiny-trees” method. Still I resisted.

Then, in the aftermath of a family crisis, my aunt repeated the suggestion when we were discussing the issue. For some reason, hearing it from her was different than hearing it from anyone else. I decided to finally give it a try.

The next time we were somewhere with a veggie tray that contained broccoli, I pointed to it and said, “Oh, look! They have trees!” My daughter looked at me like I’d lost my mind.
“Mom, that’s broccoli and I don’t like it.”
“No, it’s trees! I know it looks like broccoli, but it’s actually trees. They’re really yummy, you should try some.” To my surprise, she took a bite.
“Mmmm, I like trees!” she said, as she finished her first piece and reached for a second.

Mission accomplished.

When I Have Kids...

“When I have kids, I’ll never (fill in the blank).” We’ve all said it, or at least thought it, at some point in our childhoods and/or adolescences (probably more so during adolescence). Spanking, grounding, yelling, threatening, reading your kid’s diary…all base treachery from the point of view of a youngster trying to find their place in the world. It’s only when we become parents that we realize how much our own parents really cared about us when they committed these sins.

When I discovered I was pregnant, I became an information sponge for early childhood development. I read everything I could get my hands on: books, parenting magazines, online articles, mommy blogs. I used the plethora of available information to form my parenting persona, or so I thought. I was going to be Mother of the Year every year. I was going to be the most awesome mom ever with the most intelligent, articulate, well-behaved, well-adjusted child on the face of the planet. I was going to always be patient, kind, loving, understanding. I would set firm boundaries and expectations and only use positive redirection to enforce them. I would never, ever lose my temper or become so frustrated with my child that I lashed out in anger with a raised voice, authoritarian words and punishment; such unspeakable acts are indicative of lesser mortals than I, Super-Mom. Unfortunately, Super-Mom is a pipe dream shared by most mothers, including myself. I am, in fact, a lesser mortal.

My kid drives me crazy. There, I said it. It doesn’t mean I don’t love her. I love my daughter more than I thought it was possible to love anyone, ever. I also want to strangle her a good bit of the time. My grandiose, rose-colored view of parenting has been brought crashing back to Earth by hard, cold reality: kids are not clay to be molded in their parents’ image. They have their own personalities which help dictate their actions and responses. This is a hard pill to swallow for most parents, including my own (and myself). My daughter’s personality is very different from my own. I’m an introvert, she’s an extrovert. I have always been one to stand back quietly and observe any situation before adding myself to the mix; she dives right in. I prefer the back seat, she likes to be the center of attention. I avoid confrontation at all costs; she speaks her mind in any and every situation. My greatest challenge as a parent is conforming my discipline style to her personality type. I have yet to find the magical balance; I often find myself yelling, threatening, spanking and attempting to impose my own will on my willful child. While I know intellectually (and from personal experience) that these discipline tactics are more likely to foster resentment than to actually help her learn self-control, I have a very hard time separating my in-the-moment emotions from my end-goal. I have two mantras that I repeat to myself constantly: “Kind but firm” and “It is not my job to control my child, but to teach my child how to control herself.” I keep hoping that with enough mental repetition they will eventually sink in.

I still hope to become a better mother than I am. I have, for the most part, given up on the idea of perfection. When I do lose my temper, I talk to my daughter about it. We talk about the choices she made, what she could have done differently, what I could have done differently and how we can both do better next time. I hope that this teaches her that everyone makes mistakes, but how one handles the aftermath is important, and that mistakes are learning experiences. That, I think, is the most important thing.

Introduction

I'm the single mom of an independent, creative, soon-to-be-five year old daughter. Parenting is always an adventure, but going it alone is even more so because of the absence of another adult to talk to, tag-team with, give mutual support, and generally balance things out. I have an awesome support network of family and friends who have always been willing to babysit, include my daughter on outings, listen to me whine about my first-world single mom problems and offer support & solutions. They are just plain wonderful people who are there for me in general, and I cherish them dearly. Still, it's not the same as having another adult who lives in the same house and is equally responsible for everything.*

One of my biggest parenting flaws is my inability to see the bigger picture. All this "live in the moment" crap is counter-productive when being "in the moment" means focusing directly on the crazy/disgusting/dangerous thing your kid just did without being able to take a step back and see it for what it is: a learning opportunity. That requires a larger-scale perspective.

I have a natural ability to hit the ceiling in .00001 seconds whenever my daughter does something insanely kid-like (read: anything that makes you think, "how the hell did it even occur to you to do that?") Anyone who has been around kids for any amount of time knows that those moments can happen every five seconds, which brings me to my purpose in creating this blog: I need perspective.

I know myself well enough to recognize that having this blog will be enough of a distraction to prevent me from further scarring my child; she has already developed the cowering cringe whenever I give "the sigh" because she knows an angry lecture is coming. When I'm not in Rage-Mom mode, she tends to get a major attitude when she doesn't get her way, and I can't really blame her because I've modeled it for her. If I can get my mind on a track of "oh, this is SO going in my blog!" instead of my typical "what were you thinking/what's wrong with you???" mindset, it could help me become a better parent. Maybe. It's worth a try, anyway.

I'm leading off with a couple of pieces I've already written about parenting in general, and I'll update when I can. I'm certainly never lacking for material (<---understatement of the year).


*Shout out to all the married single moms: married moms whose spouses are overgrown children. I salute you.