Author Archives: snoozing on the sofa

I have a limited attention span, partially developed motor skills, and little perception of what you hope to accomplish; you need my help

My son is three, which means he has a biological need to help with all of the fun projects that Daddy does around the house. Little boys need to prove how indispensable they are to the proper functioning of the household.

This is a slow process. It will take him until he is about 12 to convince me that I am utterly dependent upon him. When he is 12, we will enjoy just about 3 months of the perfect father-son, symbiotic relationship. Then, nature will endow him with the blessings of teenager-hood, and it will take a girl to get him to do anything.

Since his little girlfriends aren’t likely to beguile him into mowing my lawn, I should get all the work I can out of him before they show up. Unfortunately, a three-year-old’s zeal is hardly ever matched by his handy-man skills. Still, you can’t help but admire the level of enthusiasm.

If I want my boy to instantly appear, all I need do is get out my toolbox. Screwdrivers are his favorite. He will carry a screwdriver around with him for hours, tightening everything in his path, including screws and anything else that needs to be stabbed and turned.

He likes hammers too. Hammers fit in well with his natural love of hitting. He has an uncommon zest for fixing things by pounding them until they are right. Whatever you’ve got that needs adjustment, a wall, a window, a kneecap, he’ll take care of it with his hammer. And he’ll do it all for the intangible reward of being helpful.

“Here’s an empty spot where we can put some snow.”

A boy who loves screwing things in could hardly avoid falling in love with changing light bulbs. You know the new bulbs? The ones that are all twisty-shaped, save energy by keeping your rooms dim, and are jammed full of poisonous mercury? He really enjoys handling those, because if you want to keep kids from being drawn to something toxic, by all means make it look like a soft-serve ice cream cone. I don’t let him help me so much with these, which really saddens him because he is sure in his heart that he could show me how to install them more efficiently with his hammer.

“We’ve got a lot of lawn to shovel off. Good thing we’ve got a clear space in the driveway where we can pile up the snow.”

In the winter, my son helps me shovel snow.  He follows behind me, shoveling snow from the piles I’ve created and dumping it over his shoulder, down his back, and onto the freshly-cleared sidewalk. Between the two of us, we have cut the job down so that we do only three times the shoveling I did when I had to do it all by myself.

“I’ll get rid of this big, ugly weed for you, Daddy.”

In summer, he helps me weed the flowerbeds. He picks those especially troublesome weeds with all the orange, yellow, and red soft parts at the top. These weeds attract bees, and bees can sting people. I know  he wonders how someone who has been gardening as long as I have could miss the most obvious weeds in the whole garden. Silly Daddy wastes his time on the little green sprouts in between when it is the big, colorful weeds that are using up all the space on top.

It requires extra time to be helped by a three-year-old, but it’s time well spent. I cherish his desire to help, because one day he’ll be 12, and that is practically the cusp of 13. I won’t be as cool then as I am now. Some little girl will come along and steal his attention. What kind of selfish girl would take away the helper of an old man with battered kneecaps?

To Mom, from your boys

This blog is normally written from the father’s point of view, but today it’s all about mothers. Specifically, it is about a mother who has to manage three boys, aged 6 weeks, 3 years, and 40-something, on a daily basis.

In retrospect, we try to make all of our sins seem comical, but they are not always comedy to the one who has to endure them day after day. We don’t mean to kick all of your rugs out of place with our scuffling feet. We don’t mean to roughhouse so disruptively when you’re trying to relax for a minute. We don’t mean any of the hardships we put you through. It’s just that we’re boys; we are doomed to suffer spells of inconsideration and ingratitude. We are not the most emotionally focused breed.

We try to make it up to you in little ways. We try to give you the things you need to be happy (though we sometimes miss noticing what some of those things are). Since you are a girl, we don’t always understand everything you need, but we try to meet the needs we understand.

Our ways are boy ways, so they may not always make sense to you. Still, we try hard, in our own special way, to let you know how we feel about you. And anyone versed in boy ways will hear us very clearly when we do the little things we do to quietly tell the world how much we love and need you.

Happy Mother’s Day. We love you dearly.

Happy Mother’s Day to all the mothers of the world. And to every mother who lives in a house full of boys, a special wish: May God have mercy on you.

Houston, we have splashdown

I had my first extended stint as Mr. Mom since the new baby came, and it didn’t start out so well. The baby didn’t want to sleep all day, which isn’t really a crisis, and is understandable, considering that I had nothing more soothing than a bottle to put into his mouth. But it would have been nice if he could have taken a short nap just to let me get organized before setting upon me with his verbal assault.

A crying toddler, on the other hand, is always a crisis – to the toddler anyway. And it does distract from Daddy’s ability to soothe a crying baby, which he’s not really very good at in the first place.

The three-year-old announced that he had to go potty. No problem. He’s adept at climbing onto the toilet and getting the party started all by himself. He wouldn’t need any help for a few minutes. Meanwhile, Daddy could keep arguing with the baby.

After a little while, I went into the bathroom to check on the boy. His pants were down, but he wasn’t sitting on the potty. He was standing with his shirt hiked up behind him, using two hands to buff his lower back with a hand towel. It looked like he had a bad itch.

“What’s going on?” I asked, not even in that accusing tone I most often use.

He burst into tears. Now, toddlers are pretty clever folks, but two things they have never effectively learned to do at the same time are cry and answer a lot of pointless questions. The boy made no attempt at words. He focused all his attention upon his wailing. The baby heard his song and picked up the harmony.

“I can’t have two crying kids,” I told him, a little in that annoyed father tone I most often use. “Tell me what’s wrong.”

For a second, he tried to say something, but the crying would not relent.

“Stop crying and tell me what’s wrong,” I insisted, comfortingly, instead of in the impatient tone I most often use.

“My shirt’s wet,” he choked out between sobs.

“How’d your shirt get wet?” I asked. You can probably imagine all the tonal cues from here.

“I don’t know.”

When my son says, “I don’t know,” it means one of the following, in order of frequency:

a.) “I think the truth might get me into trouble, so I’m pleading the fifth.”

b.) “I’m really embarrassed and I’d rather not talk about it.”

c.) “I don’t know.” This last example is a rare usage, usually reserved for questions of an academic nature (e.g. “What number comes after 19?”).

I may not be the world’s most perceptive parent, but I know there are only two sources of water in our downstairs bathroom, and I didn’t hear the sink running. Further investigation revealed that his toddler potty seat was over in the corner, where it could do nothing toward keeping him high and dry.

“Did you fall in?” I asked.

Footstool, toddler seat, books to read – of all the amenities, only the toddler seat is indispensable. Alas . . .

“Maybe.”

“Okay. Take off your shirt. I’ll get you a new one.”

I got him cleaned up and settled back into the world. We spoke no more of the incident. I didn’t even laugh, and I want credit for that. Somebody falls into the toilet and a guy with four brothers doesn’t even laugh. That’s love, pure and simple.

I think the baby might have laughed though. He stopped crying for minute, which is as good as a laugh to me. But I guess he has to laugh at this kind of stuff. It’s his brother.

Give up your lost cause, Daddy

Pickett’s Charge was the crescendo of Gettysburg, the high water mark of the Confederacy. Thousands of men charged toward a strongly defended line. They reached that line and punctured it. At that moment, they must have felt the euphoria of hard-fought victory.

Then, their charge ran out of steam. They were thrown back, battered and bruised. It was the beginning of the end for them.

Why do I mention Pickett’s Charge in a parenting blog?

Because at 1 a.m. this morning, as I was struggling to get the baby to sleep, I thought about all the men in history who fought hard and thought they had won, only to be cast backward into defeat. It isn’t that I wish Pickett’s Charge had succeeded; I’m very satisfied that it failed. Yet, as this fidgety baby turned my hard-won victory to defeat, I felt the weary pain of having the tables turn against me at the crucial moment.

The High Water Mark at Gettysburg. The monument to Daddy’s High Water Mark is the bruise he got while walking, half asleep, into the bathroom door frame on his way to the shower in the morning. (Photo: National Park Service)

At 11:30 p.m. the baby started crying. I took him downstairs and poured him three fingers of milk. He finished about two fingers worth before he waved off the bottle with his spastic little hands.

For an hour, I rocked him, swayed with him, and bounced him on my knee. He didn’t cry, but he didn’t close his eyes either. He just sat there looking cute, and awake. Occasionally, he would punk me by fitting a tall yawn in between his moments of contemplative staring at the ceiling.

Finally, his eyes got droopy. I took him upstairs and put him into his cradle. This perked him right up again. To keep things moving in the right direction, I gave him my pinky finger to suckle. He settled down.

For long, uncomfortable minutes, I hunched over him, rocking his cradle and feeding him my finger. It was working. As he drifted further into sleep, I eased my finger loose from his gums. In another instant, I would be free. Victory and a soft pillow would be mine!

Then the tables turned. We were doomed by the Moro Reflex.

The Moro Reflex is that instinct that makes babies fling their arms up over their heads at moments critical to their parents’ escapes. I have noticed two variations of the Moro Reflex. The Little Moro Reflex is the one where the baby throws his arms up in one fluid motion. I call this the Praise the Lord Reflex. The baby comes out of R.E.M. long enough to ask his dreams, “Can I get a witness?” then slips right back into deep slumber.

The Big Moro Reflex is the one where the baby violently jerks himself awake throwing his arms up and casting them all about for some vine or lemur tail to catch hold of. His eyes jolt open, and in them you can hear him think, “Holy shit, I’m falling out of the monkey tree!” The baby is now irrevocably awake.

At 1 a.m. this morning, my baby boy was stricken with the Big Moro Reflex. It was my high water mark.

An action shot of the Moro Reflex. This is only a dramatization; no parents were exhausted during the taking of this picture.

I jammed my pinky back into his mouth, but it was too late. My victory was slipping away from me, and I knew it. Everything was trending in the wrong direction, right up to the point when the boy signaled my defeat with his battle cry.

This cry woke my wife. She saw that I was a shell of the proud soldier I had once been. I was summarily relieved of duty. Maybe I had earned a rest, but I had earned no victory. Just like the survivors of Pickett’s Charge.