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Mommy Talk
August 2009
Monday August 31, 2009
Posted by: bthoreson at 6:14PM CST on August 31, 2009
The rubber duckie was dead to him. The plastic tugboat, the blue hippo and the scooper thing shaped like a shell had all outlived their usefulness. They had served their time in the bath valiantly, but Sean was no longer amused. So we found some new tub toys to keep him busy while being scrubbed. The bag o’ letters and numbers became an instant hit. Get them wet and they stick to the tub walls. That’s the intended use, anyway. He preferred to hand them to us, one by one. It’s a serious test of coordination to wield a washcloth while grabbing a wet foam "L", especially when you’re not given time to put it down before you’re expected to grab the "S," "T," "3" and "7". As someone whose brain is allergic to multitasking, the only way I could retain my sanity was to name out loud each letter or number as he handed it over. For months, I cycled through that disjointed alphabet. The boy was always quiet during this show, which was a victory. Near bedtime, noise usually meant crankiness. But I wished we had waited till he was older to buy a toy like that, till he could learn something from it. By the time he could understand what he was playing with, I figured, he’d have thrown the letters on the bonfire pile with the blue hippo. Then one day, as I mustered the enthusiasm for my 837th bath-time monologue, Sean picked up a blue 9 from among the pile and stared at it for a second. "NINE!" he said for most of West Racine to hear. What was that? Must’ve been daydreaming. That sounded a lot like ... "NINE!" I lavished him with praise, the whole time convinced it was a coincidence. This was, after all, the same toddler who exclaims "Dada!" when he sees pictures of me — or pictures of authors inside book jackets or even candidates’ faces on campaign literature. Time to expose the cruel hoax. I held up a Q. "What’s this, Sean?" "COO!" Close enough. You pass. In the past several weeks, he has mastered most of the letters and numbers. Bath time is more of a two-way refresher quiz than a monologue now. That’s what Sean learned. What I learned is kids are a long-term investment. Whatever we as parents plant in their heads today won’t necessarily germinate today or this month or even this year. Someday, that will mean following the advice of those sternly worded public-service announcements and repeatedly hammering home messages about staying away from drugs, sex or Vikings fans. For now, it’s just encouraging to know we can pour some water and watch the seeds of knowledge grow. I recommend warm, soapy water. By Mike Moore Tuesday August 18, 2009
Posted by: JT Reporter Brendan O'Brien at 11:46AM CST on August 18, 2009
Someone – I think Henry’s doctor – once said she knew she was a mother, when she saw her child throwing up and reached out to try to catch it. The first time I heard that story, I thought: Man, that’s not something I’ll ever be doing. Then came the day I was holding Henry after a feeding, and he let loose with what seemed like all the milk he had just downed. I was much easier to clean than the couch, so I held him close, and then put all the dirty clothes right down the chute. I did the same thing four more times before the day was through. My dreams of motherhood included snuggling, reading books and taking walks. I knew there would be spit-up and diaper changes included, but I had no idea just how often – or how messy – those would be. I had changed diapers before having Henry, and I had been spit upon by babies. What I had never experienced, however, was the 24-hour, 7-day-a-week mess factory that is a newborn. As he got older, the messes didn’t go away. They changed. One day he smeared poop all over his crib and the wall. There was the day he splashed toilet water everywhere, then dumped the cat food into the cat water, and all of that on the floor. He spilled a bottle of bubble solution in the living room. On Monday, when I picked Henry up from day care, they told me he hadn’t had a nap. Odd, I thought, but nothing to worry about. When we got home, I put him in his high chair and gave him a coloring book and a few crayons so I could make dinner without worrying about little hands and hot stoves. I was almost done cooking when I heard him start to lose it in the dining room. “Mama. Mama. Carry you!” he cried. (“Carry you” is Henry-speak for “Pick me up.”) “You can have a hug,” I told him, “but I’ve got to finish dinner.” I gave him the hug, and went to go back to the stove. He wailed. “Carry you! Carry you! Mama!” I sighed and picked him up. As I held him close, he lurched. He got sick on me. On my favorite T-shirt. On his duck-duck-goose onesie. Even though I knew it was going to keep happening, I brought him closer. We went into the bathroom. I put him in the empty tub and took off my shirt. By this time, he’d started to cry. He wasn’t upset about being sick, though. “Dirty,” he said. “Mess.” He kept pointing, sobbing, and telling me about the dirty mess. My heart broke. I kept telling him that it was OK, that I loved him, and worked quickly to make that mess disappear so that he’d feel better. I washed him off under the tub faucet, dried him off and got him into pajamas. We had a quiet night that night. Later, as I retold this story to family and friends, something hit my heart. Henry, at 21 months of age, wasn’t worried about his own problem, his own sickness or discomfort. He was worried about the mess that I was going to have to clean up. When do we lose that? When do we become more concerned about ourselves than others? As a parent, there was no effort, no conscious decision that I ever made, to put Henry’s needs first: That’s just how love functions. On Monday, he gave that right back to me and showed the loving nature he’s already got. Saturday August 1, 2009
Posted by: Janine Anderson at 7:54PM CST on August 1, 2009
It’s official. On my son’s sixth birthday, the number of pets in my house became equal to the number of people. As of July 24, the Tenuta household contains a mom, a dad, two boys, a girl, a cat, three goldfish, and a gecko. The newest addition to our family is the gecko. His name is Gregory, and we adopted him for our middle child as a birthday gift. (The name was inherited.) Gregory is a new experience for us, and most specifically for my animal- reptile- fish- bird- and insect-loving 6-year-old. I grew up with dogs. My husband grew up with parents who believed animals belonged outside in the wild. When he and his brothers asked for a dog, they got a ceramic statue of a German Shepherd. It took a lot of convincing to get my husband to agree to our first pet. We were given our cat Begonia the year after we were married; two years before we had our first child. She quickly became our baby. We were at a party once, talking about our cat when a friend of my sister-in-law’s pulled her aside and said, “They named their kid Begonia?!” Seriously. Begonia wasn’t so happy when we brought our oldest home. She ignored me for three days. When the kids began to walk and talk, she decided she disliked them even more, and began hissing and swatting at them. She still does it when they run by or irritate her. So my children have never had the experience of really caring for and playing with a pet. Begonia wouldn’t let them near her with a 10-foot-pole. Last July, my animal-crazy boy received two goldfish and an aquatic frog for his birthday from an indulgent uncle. My son was absolutely over the moon. The only problem was he kept trying to hold the frog. “He wants to play with me!” my then-5-year-old would insist, stomping his foot for effect, after we’d catch him trying to scoop the frog out of the fish tank. “He’ll die. He needs the water,” we would say. Our near-constant warnings did nothing to dissuade our adamant son. One morning he took Skipper the frog out of the tank and “played” with his pet. Then he set the frog on the bathroom counter. Later that day, after we had peeled what was left of Skipper from the counter, we had a flushing funeral. Both my sons sobbed. I’m hoping Gregory has a better experience in our home. So far, having him has been mostly positive. My son takes his gecko out to play every day — which I’m told this type of lizard likes. He also helps us feed and water Gregory. He is careful with him and shuts his bedroom door when the gecko is out of its tank, so Begonia doesn’t get it. The only downsides to our new reptilian friend thus far is his choice in food is pretty gross (crickets), and his poop. I won’t go into details, but it’s kind of big and bird-poopish. But Gregory makes my son happy, so I’ll live with the eating of live crickets and ugly gecko poop. I just hope my kid doesn’t plan to advance to snakes anytime soon. That’s one aquarium I would NOT be cleaning. |
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