Tag Archives: growing up

The Terrible Twos wait for no one

Big Man was considering the “Terrible Twos” recently, thinking about how his second birthday is still five months off, when he had a toddler epiphany: why wait? There’s no law that says you have to wait until two to be terrible. Besides with all the good work he already has under his belt: making mincemeat out of Daddy’s CD collection, destroying all his brothers’ best LEGO creations, becoming a master artist in the medium of ripped books and papers, he’s already got a meatier resume in terrible than most authentic two-year-olds.

I must reluctantly agree. Big Man has outgrown the level of destruction, chaos, and all-around mess-making expected of a one-year-old. It’s difficult for parents to see their kids grow up so quickly, but to attempt to hold him back from the terrible twos would be an injustice to his nature.

There’s lots of fun to be had in the terrible twos, unless you happen to be one of the unfortunate people who is not two, and also not terrible. In that case, you might not see all the fun in it. You may not be able to picture the fun through all the mopping up and taping back together you find yourself doing. But everybody has their role to play; that’s the beauty of the system.

"You didn't need any of this stuff, did you?"

“You didn’t need any of this stuff, did you?”

I don’t want to say Big Man is a naughty boy; I want to use euphemisms like “active” and  my favorite, “busy.” Big Man is indeed a “busy” little boy. He is very busy being naughty. But it’s all in good fun. He doesn’t have a malicious bone in his body. It’s just that his idea of good fun means somebody has to clean it up or glue it back together, or just throw it away and realize that God didn’t mean for him to have nice things.

"Got my safety goggles on, now lets fix some stuff that aint broken."

“Got my safety goggles on, now let’s fix some stuff that ain’t broken yet.”

Big Man is very curious as to how things work, and most often you’ve got to take it apart to see how it works. I’m convinced he needs to know how every single thing in our house works, now that he knows the secret to figuring it out. Child safety latches mean nothing to him. Wait, I take that back. Safety latches mean there is a rewarding treasure of dangerous things to discover behind this cabinet door – possibly things that can be plugged in.

the mother lode

It’s easier to find the right pan when they are spread out over the kitchen floor. What a helpful boy!

In fairness, I must say that Big Man revels in being helpful. He will bring you your shoes, regardless of whether you intend going out. He is so eager to give you your shoes that he sometimes flings them at you from across the room. If a shoe happens to clip your head, that’s a helpful reminder that you should always keep an eye out for your shoes after you decide to go out – and sometimes before you decide. Also, it is not the most painful thing likely to hit your head today, so just count your blessing and put on your shoes.

And my blessing always include Big Man.

Hay still smells good, but Daddy’s done with cows

For some strange reason, it smelled like a haymow on the second floor of my building yesterday. It’s not the kind of space that should smell like hay. Maybe somebody was just wearing an extra dose of Barnyard by Calvin Klein. Whatever the reason, it sent my mind reeling back to the 1970s.

The images in my memory were not ones of attempting to lug hay bales as big as myself, or of scratching up my arms on the rough edges of cut hay. They weren’t of getting blisters in the joints of my destined-for-office-work fingers from the friction of baler twine. They weren’t of trying to balance on a moving wagon while keeping out of the way of bigger kids who could actually heft the bales up onto the stack.

My memories were of building forts with bales in the mow; of playing hide and seek and tunneling between the stacks; of the hay smelling fun, not being the odor of sweat and hard work.

haymow diplomacy

Ah, those good old days! Making forts, hiding out, and negotiating international treaties in the wonderland of the haymow. It was good to be a kid. (Image: Ridson Tillery – US Farm Security Administration)

My wife once asked me if I regretted my children not having that kind of upbringing. I said no.

They’ll have much more opportunity in their suburban childhoods than I had in my rural one. They will have schools with more resources, and a wider variety of people with which to interact. They will miss out on some particular brands of fun, but they’ll miss much of that fun merely because it’s not the ‘70s anymore. Even in the country, it’s 2015, with 2015 rules and regulations.

A farm life would be good to teach them the value of hard work. It might teach them that you can smell bad and still walk tall, as long as you smell bad for a good reason, and only when necessary. It could teach them humility, as it did me when my job was to hold cows’ tails. Cows’ tails can get to be very – let’s call it grimy – and having to hold them tight can make a young dandy have to swallow a good portion of his pride.

All the cows are doin it

Even with a friend along to help talk to the cow into it, I still don’t want to do any more milking. (Image: John Vachon – US Farm Security Administration)

There can be many character benefits to a farm life, but I don’t want it for my boys. The selfish truth of the matter is I don’t want it for me, because if they lived on a farm, I’d have to live there too, and I don’t want to. I don’t want to start work at 4 a.m. and knock off after dark. I don’t want to carry blisters on my still perfect-office-worker fingers all through haying season. I don’t want to coerce milk from an animal who doesn’t feel like giving it up, or even one who does. I don’t want my livelihood held hostage by the weather or a far-away commodities market. And I never want to have to grab hold of another cow’s stinky, sticky, wet tail again.

I’ve decided the second floor of my building smelled more like a silo. Silos were always dark and damp inside. I never had any fun in a silo.

A night in the life

[Once again we are joined by our special guest blogger, Buster: age 2.]

I slept in a big-boy bed last night. It was exciting but also scary.

I sometimes wake up in the night. I’m not sure why. I’m still very tired, but I wake up all of a sudden. The parents tell me I should just lay down and go back to sleep. That’s easy for them to say; they don’t remember the confusion about your surroundings when you’re two and you open your eyes to darkness all around. Especially if you just had a weird dream.

You guys think you have weird dreams. It’s a good thing you don’t remember the dreams you had at my age. My dreams are completely off the hook.

The cool thing about a big-boy bed is that I don’t have to wait for somebody to rescue me when I’m upset at night. The first time I woke up last night, I slid right out of bed. My parents always keep their door ajar, so I just bulldozed through it like it was nothing. I was snuggled in between Mama and Daddy, lickety-split. I didn’t even have to cry.

the place where I used to live

Bye, bye, crib!

Later, I woke up again. I was back in my own bed, which was kind of freaky. I got a little wigged out and started to cry. Daddy came and took me back to bed with him and Mama. I couldn’t get calmed down right away and they got frustrated that I wouldn’t use my words instead of crying.

Well, here’s the thing about my words: I have a good vocabulary, but don’t like wasting a lot of time on consonants when I talk. Speech would be lots more efficient if we focused on vowel sounds. K is an exceptionally bad consonant. T isn’t so bad, so I often use it in place of k. No big deal, right? Why try over spilled milt?

The upshot is that when I’m excited or scared, my parents don’t always understand my words. On top of that, my vocabulary is heavy on nouns and verbs. Things like “I want” and “Give me” and “M&Ms”. You know, the important stuff. I haven’t gotten around to the conceptual words yet – the ones that explain why you woke up confused, or all the funky stuff that just went down in your dreams.

new digs

Hello, big boy bed!

So I do the best I can with body language. I try to make them understand that sometimes, in the uncertain world between dreams, I just need to be reassured. I need to be held by one of the people in whom I place all of my faith to make the world right. Maybe I just need to hold one of the hands that keeps me safe.

I know they wish I could just roll over and go back to sleep. Maybe now that I can get up and go to them whenever I need to, it will get easier to do that.

On the other hand, I’m not saying I’m ready to give up the middle spot in their bed just yet.

Lessons from the great heifer attack of 1974

It was probably 1974, that day when my little brother and I were playing in the pasture behind the barn. I was skipping pebbles across the creek (pronounced: crick, in this story). My little brother was shooting pebbles at the backside of a Holstein heifer.

I wasn’t paying attention to my brother. I considered neither he nor the heifer to be any of my concern. It was a childish presumption.

The heifer bellowed at him, but that wasn’t any of my business. I had stones to skip. They could work out their disagreements on their own.

I didn’t notice my brother go under the barbed wire fence and up into the barn. I was alone with the heifer, and she was still nursing a grudge against human children and their pebbles.

In a better world

One day, we might have been friends, if not for the pebble incident.

Somehow, the heifer imagined that pebbles were still hitting her. And since there was a nearby human child with pebbles in hand, she concluded that I was the culprit and should be chastised.

When I looked up from my experiments, I discovered her bearing down upon me.

A heifer is not large for a cow, but she is plenty large for a little boy. I ran toward the fence. If I could slide beneath the bottom row of wire before she caught me, I’d be safe.

I almost made it.

Dairyland thugs

A gang of young toughs, on the lookout for a fresh victim. (Image: Marion Post Wolcott/US Farm Security Administration)

I was within arm’s reach of the fence when she knocked me on my back. Before I could shimmy under the wire, she pinned me, her head planted firmly upon my chest.

I still don’t know if she intended to kill me or merely teach me a lesson. She was still a young’un too, so maybe she hadn’t figured that out for herself yet. At the time, I felt doomed.

I tried to scream my fool head off, but it wasn’t easy with her squishing me like a bug. It was hard to breath, let alone scream. My whole life passed before my eyes. I was seven; it was a short film.

I remember seeing the sky, which was where I supposed Heaven was, so at least I’d get a good look at where I was headed. My little brother would get to stay here and play in the creek. Life was so unfair.

Just when it seemed like Heaven was the only exit, I slid beneath the fence. I didn’t do this under my own power, as I was completely powerless. I was dragged under the fence by an arm or leg and carried away by my father. I don’t know how he got there, but I am older and wiser because he did.

The heifer was, no doubt, disappointed at being robbed of her kill. I probably got spanked for antagonizing the livestock, but when you’ve cheated death, a spanking is practically a treat.

"Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I submit to you that my client could not be guilty of the attempted murder of that boy as she is neither a Holstein nor a heifer."

“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I submit to you that my client could not be guilty of the attempted murder of that boy as she is neither a Holstein nor a heifer.”

One day I will tell my boys this story. They don’t live on a farm, but they can still take a valuable lesson from it: Whether it’s with bovines or the girls at school, you can always count on a brother to leave you in an awkward situation.

You’re an extremely lucky lad if your dad can get you out of it.