UnchartedParent.com

“Sorry.”

This word was offered to my husband by my two-year-old daughter, after she capped off a string of defiant acts by peeing on our bedroom carpet as he attempted to diaper her for bedtime.

At first glance, the statement seems unremarkable.  But here’s the amazing part: the apology was unsolicited.  And even more impressive, it was backed up by more sincerity than has been, say, any apology offered to date by our five-year-old son for just about anything.

The unexpected remorse expressed by “Emmie” resulted in a complete transformation of my husband’s attitude.  Whereas seconds before Emmie’s apology, my husband looked sufficiently frustrated to lay waste to the nearest available bedding, that one little word caused his face to soften, his heart to melt and the whole scene seem like not such a big deal after all. 

What a lesson for Emmie.  By uttering just one word, she was able to alter completely the dynamics of a situation.

What a lesson for the rest of us: sometimes all you need is just one little word.

Love is being in New York City for the first time in years, and dining at . . . Uno’s.

“Jack” and I traveled to New York earlier this week to gaze at dinosaurs and tall buildings (in that order), and to visit his grandparents who live nearby.   The dinosaurs at the American Museum of Natural History were spectacular and abundant, the very quantity of them on display nearly overwhelming Jack at first.  After the first large roomful, however, Jack grew more comfortable, and he was amazed to discover numerous species of dinosaurs he’d never even heard of.  In the museum’s Discovery Room, we came upon perhaps the coolest interactive exhibit I have seen yet in any children’s museum space: a partially constructed skeleton (plastic, but it seemed very real) of a prestosuchus, a crocodile-like dinosaur.  Children were urged to remove the remaining “bones” from drawers and finish building the skeleton.  Jack embraced this task with all of the enthusiasm of the budding paleontologist he seems to be, and, despite the hovering docents, he proudly completed the skeleton (and even put the pieces away when he was done).

After we closed the museum, it was time to find dinner.  Jack was exhausted and hungry, so I knew we had to stick close by.  I also knew—Jack being Jack—that I would need to find a restaurant that would serve plain pasta, and I hoped that some cute little trattoria might present itself in the next block or so. 

Sadly, I saw our destination even before we crossed the street.  Uno’s stood straight in front of us, generic and picky child-friendly.  My eyes searched to the right and left; I took in a dozen chic stores, but no other realistic restaurant option save a Ray’s Pizza.  I made a half-hearted effort to convince Jack that he could love this culinary legend, even though it wasn’t from our neighborhood pizza joint.  But he would have none of it.

So there I was, in the city that never sleeps, where one could dine in a different restaurant and café every day and never get though them all, where sushi and pizza and mile-high deli sandwiches and haute cuisine and neighborhood dives all called my name . . . and I got a salad at Uno’s.

And Jack?  He ate his dinner, and he was happy.

My heart was satisfied, but my stomach will sob for a week.

For the past couple of months, I’ve been semi-torturing two-year-old “Emmie” by letting her bangs grow long.  They are now at their most bothersome stage; they completely cover her eyes unless pulled back in a very specific hairdo, but they are not even close to long enough to tuck behind her ears.   I haven’t been sure whether I would like her better with or without the bangs, but I figured that by letting them grow out, I could see her both ways and pick the look I thought was cutest.  (And yes, I am taking full advantage of this very brief period in her life when I get 100 percent of the decision-making power in matters of her looks!)

Alas, the experiment is to be cut short.

“Jack” and I are scheduled to go away for a few days starting this evening, and I will be leaving Emmie in my husband’s quite capable hands.  Other than feeling a bit sad for Emmie, who will undoubtedly miss both me and her brother, I’ve had few worries about this temporary arrangement.

But tonight, as I readied Emmie for bed, I had an epiphany: if I didn’t cut Emmie’s bangs short before I left, Emmie wouldn’t be able to see a thing for three whole days!

It’s not that my husband is unwilling to do Emmie’s hair for her in the morning; he has tried.  But his fingers simply have no idea how to pull up smoothly just the right section of hair and twist a tiny hair elastic around it three times so that the hair will stay in place.  He has grooming talents that I, as a typical female, lack, of course: for example, if absolutely necessary, he can be ready to walk out the door exactly five minutes after popping out of bed.  If pressed, I can accomplish the same task in fifty minutes.  We just have different abilities, and arranging a little girl’s hair is completely outside of my husband’s skill set.

So it no longer matters how I ultimately think Emmie’s hair would look with bangs.  If I don’t want the poor girl to spend three solid days scooping her hair off of her face, I need to take drastic action before I leave.  It’s time for the scissors.

That’s okay; I think she looks pretty darn cute with the bangs anyway!

An additional note: assuming neither one of my kids still has a fever tomorrow, Jack and I will be gone most of the week.  So my next post will be on Friday, April 27.

I shed layers as I walked, feeling the plagues of this bizarre, prolonged winter falling off with each article of clothing.

The past few days have left me downhearted, discouraged.  I’ve always found the period spanning mid-March to mid-April to be the most difficult time of the year in New England.  The calendar tells you it’s spring, but your senses argue differently.  This year, our lack of spring has been particularly difficult to bear, with freezing temperatures consistently tens of degrees below normal and two crushing, power-devouring, flood-bringing storms in just the past two weeks.  The skies have been gray, the air damp at best, and the storms’ consequences depressing.  For example, my husband and I have been forced to conclude that we will need to shell out $15,000 or more on various drainage measures for our new house, most of which we don’t have (the money, that is).  It’s enough to make me want to crawl into some deceptively warm recess of the house—say, under the covers—and not come out again.

But over the past few hours, the sun came out again!  Literally.  Truly unable to recall the last time I saw it and felt its warmth, I found myself itching for the water-damage crew to vacate my house so I, too, could emerge and exercise my winter-beaten body in a walk around my still-new neighborhood.

As I walked, the thoughts in my head metamorphosed from heavy jackets and wet basements to the houses around me that would soon open doors and windows, spilling children, parents and pets out into the world to greet each other for the first time in months.  I began to think about the parks I would soon visit with my kids and of getting together with friends and their kids for summer walks, romps and visits to local attractions.  I saw picnics and pool visits, heard my kids laugh as they played in the yard until bedtime and smelled the unmistakable aroma of neighbors grilling steaks next door.  Homemade daiquiris, chapters of books read in stolen moments on the sun porch and kids falling asleep as soon as their exhausted heads touch their pillows, worn out with the endless opportunities for running, screaming and just being kids—all of these scenes played like a movie through my weary mind.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m still depressed about the money and the wet basement.  I’m still sick of contractors tying me to my house during the day and filled with regret about the vacation plans that will need to be erased to try to pay for utterly humorless but necessary items like remedial drainage. 

But finally, as I walked around the block and pulled off the layers of winter one-by-one, I began to see the light at the end of the long winter tunnel.  Be gone, Mud Season; there’s no room for you here anymore!

I don’t really know what to write about yesterday’s massacre at Virginia Tech.  I don’t know what more there is to say than what I wrote six months ago after the last school shooting.

I sort of thought I would have more time before the next horror occurred.

That’s part of the point, though, isn’t it?  These heinous crimes spring up without warning, resistant to all emotional preparation.  They leave us feeling numb, bewildered, damaged.   Each time it happens, we want desperately to learn from the tragedy, to figure out the answer that will permit us to ensure that it never, ever happens again.  And we pray fervently, in accordance with whatever belief system we hold, that our own loved ones never figure in the list of victims.

But try as we might, that answer never comes.  And though we might improve security measures or learn better how to identify and reach out to potential perpetrators before they strike, no amount of time will coat our schools with the violence-resistant Teflon we crave.

There is no satisfactory explanation for these types of crimes, no step we can take to ensure that our kids never find themselves facing the barrel of a gun in school.  All we can do is mourn, commiserate, sympathize, reach out, and prepare and protect our own schools and kids to the best of our abilities.  As we do these things and hope and pray that we never face this situation ourselves, we also must find a way to resist that urge to withdraw from society to protect our kids. 

Uncharted Parent offers its condolences to everyone affected by the tragedy at Virginia Tech.  We are shocked and saddened with you.

That’s all I can think of to say.

I don’t offer bribes to my kids very often because it’s important to me that they learn to do things like clean up their toys and eat dinner for the right reasons.

There is also an important side effect to avoiding bribes on a daily basis: it gives me an extremely useful tool when I really, really need it.

Today is a bribery day.

Today’s nor’easter has dumped profuse amounts of rain outside, and sent a fair amount of water into our basement as well.  Sadly, though I recently won the dispute with my husband to install a sump pump, sump pumps don’t work when you lose electrical power.  Thus far, we’ve mopped up much of the water, set up an intricate system of buckets and duct tape to assist the not-yet-fully-installed sump pump, scheduled an appointment with the water-damage cleanup guys who charge $500 just to walk in your door, and we have a plan for tonight to go through the considerable amount of our belongings still in our basement from our move and determine what needs to be thrown away.  We are also coming to the very reluctant conclusion, after two storms in two weeks, that we need to buy a generator and contract to have some very expensive drainage work done in our yard.  I feel overwhelmed and depressed.

And I just don’t have the patience for parenting today.

Of course, you can’t call in sick to parenting.  You can’t say, hey, there’s a ton of water in my basement and I can’t do the job today.  The kids have to be fed, the baby has to be changed, etc.

But I can bribe!

In truth, my two-year-old is too young to really respond to the concept of a bribe.  But my five-year-old was angelic all morning after being promised a present if he behaved well and let us deal with our house mess.  Now he’s playing with his gifts (taken from my secret cache of toys and books in my bedroom), and I’m stealing the time to write this post.

I’m glad today that I don’t use bribes with my kids often, because today has proved that when I really need a way to ensure good behavior, I have this little-used—and therefore novel—tool to fall back on.  To be sure, the day went easier than it might otherwise have once we regained power and I could turn on the videos—no limit today—but the promises of treats definitely helped, too.

Now if only there were some way to extract a promise of good behavior from my house!

It’s a chore, it’s a challenge, it’s a game.  It’s a necessity, it’s omnipresent, it’s Sisyphean mythology.  It’s a lead ball chained to my ankle, a burden on my back, a check mark on my daily to-do list.  I can measure achievement by its decrease, and lament the banality of existence through its ceaseless repetition.  It stimulates four of the five senses—in attractive and repellent ways—and it will go on for the rest of my life.  It’s like those trick birthday candles that momentarily extinguish when you blow them out, but then spring back to life once more.

Here’s one constant I’ve noticed about having kids: I’m always doing laundry.

There is a long laundry list (pun intended) of the aspects of parenting that are rarely understood by anyone who doesn’t have a child.  I believe laundry is one of these.  You know that you will have a lot of baby clothes to wash, but you don’t realize that those clothes will need to be washed in three separate loads every four days, that your own and your spouse’s clothing use will double or triple as a result of smashed peas and baby vomit (later traded in for falsely-labeled mess-proof paints and layers of mud and dirt) or that you might recoil in horror at the thought of combining your daughter’s delicate, lace-trimmed sweater with your son’s post-potty-accident pants.  And I haven’t even mentioned the dozens of towels, washcloths and abused bedding components that constantly require rewashing and refreshing.  A kid doesn’t just double your laundry; it would be closer to say it quadruples the load.

Fortunately for me, despite my overwhelming lack of domesticity, laundry is one of the few tasks from which I don’t recoil.  Ask me to clean a bathtub or iron a set of curtains, and I’ll be gone faster than you can say “scrubbing bubbles.”  Washing dishes by hand sets my teeth on edge, and I generally don’t dust unless I can actually write my name on the furnishing in question.  But for some reason, I don’t mind doing the laundry. 

I even find I get a slightly disturbing sense of satisfaction on those rare occasions when all of the socks in a load have mates.  That could mean that I have an alarmingly dull life, I suppose.  But I don’t think that is the case.  I think it’s more likely that I’ve just somehow come to expect that no matter how much laundry I do, I will never be done.  So I find those little victories when I can.

Oh, I just heard the dryer stop.  Time to fold another load . . . .

Grover is back in my life.

That’s Grover from Sesame Street, and my five-year-old son and I are spending time with him these days between the pages of one of my favorite childhood books, The Monster at the end of this Book.  The book tells an adorable tale about Grover facing his fear of monsters and discovering that there was nothing for him to be afraid of after all.  I remember reading this book over and over again, fascinated by the self-referential story told by Grover as he tried desperately to convince me not to keep turning the pages—which of course made me want to turn them more.

I’d long since left Grover behind.  But when I saw the book in the children’s section of a bookstore, I knew I had to buy it for my kids.  And just as I’d hoped, my son loves it, too.

Now I get to have fun with this book all over again, but this time I know why it’s so attractive to my son, and I am treated to the added joy of seeing him giggle as we turn the pages and defy Grover’s warnings.

One of the many joys of raising our kids is sharing with them so many fondly remembered aspects of our own childhood.  In many cases, of course, our kids express a bubble-bursting disinterest in our nostalgia; let’s face it, Atari Pong just isn’t going to cut it for kids who can’t imagine life without the latest iPod accessory (and who beg for—but in my house, will never get—the coolest Xbox in town).  But sometimes, books, movies and toys become classics with good reason, and Richard Scarry’s Best Word Book Ever can be just as enchanting to our progeny as it was in the days of our own youth.  (Yup, that’s another one of my favorites.)

It’s the next-best thing to actually becoming a kid again.

It has been brought to my attention by numerous sources in the past week that a film currently in theaters, Disney’s Meet the Robinsons, carries some very disturbing adoption messages.  I can’t post a review because I have not seen the film, but I have received consistent alerts about the alleged insensitive content of the movie and the potential emotional havoc it could wreak on a young child who happens to see it, especially if that child is adopted.

The Executive Director of Wide Horizons For Children (the agency we used for our adoption), Vicki Peterson, issued a public warning about this film.  As a service to my readers, I am posting a link to that press release.  I encourage all parents, especially adoptive parents, to learn as much as possible about this movie before deciding whether or not to take your kids to see it.

Let’s see; where did this migraine come from?

It could have been the night without electricity, water or heat (that stretched well into the day).  It could have been my intermittent internet connection (in fact, I wanted to post this entry yesterday, but I had no service all day), or the piles and piles of dirty laundry that have built up over a crazy week.  It could have been the days of Passover cooking followed by an unexpected, unwanted snowstorm.  Maybe it was the sudden loss of water in the house just as it seemed that all had returned to normal.

Last week, I penned (can you use that word when you write on a computer?) a blog post about the magic of a northern New England spring—or, more accurately, Mud Season.  I wrote of maple syrup on snow and children cavorting in the woods.

Wednesday night, we found ourselves on the flip side of early April in this part of the country: a spring storm of sleet, followed by heavy, wet snow, and lots of it.  This isn’t the kind of snow that begs you to fly on a sled with your kids down the nearest hill.  No, Mud Season snow falls in great clumps from your roof as still more drops down from the drab, gray sky.  It weighs down power lines—like the one nearly touching my front yard at this very moment—and gets in your boots despite your best efforts to pick your way around swampy puddles.  In short, it’s an unwelcome, headache-inducing mess that shows up way too late in the season to be appreciated by anyone but the most devout lovers of winter.

Even five-year-old “Jack,” stuck following me around on a snow day that featured snow too goopy to play with, kept repeating a mantra throughout the day: “I wish it were summer.  I wish it were summer.”

Hey, kid, I’m right there with you.  Of course, we’ll probably be complaining about the bugs and the heat by the beginning of June.

On the other hand, maybe you’ll be able to stop brushing your teeth with bottled water by then.