Tag Archives: toddlers

How to drive a toddler over the edge

This truth is self-evident. One-year-olds are patriots in their zealous devotion to the pursuit of happiness. They want happiness, and they want it now. They’ll let you know, quickly and unambiguously, when the path they are on deviates from that ultimate goal.

The path deviates regularly, because the things that make a one-year-old happy are often disruptive, destructive, dangerous, or all of the above. Further frustrating the pursuit of happiness is their reluctance to abandon the notion that parents can make all their wishes come true, regardless of the laws of physics or better judgment.

Our one-year-old’s happiness is hindered by baby gates. He isn’t bothered that they prevent him from going down the stairs; someone will carry him down, if he asks. Baby gates frustrate him because they have a mechanism that he cannot operate. He doesn’t need freedom to pass the gate; he wants the knowledge to open it, to liberate himself from ignorance.

gateway to hell

This gate has a long history of vexing one toddler and numerous adults. It has been pulled out of the wall twice – probably not by the toddler.

Once, when he was especially frustrated by the gate atop the basement stairs, I tried to explain the purpose of baby gates to him. I told him that baby gates wouldn’t be useful if all manner of little people could operate them. I was careful in my explanation, but he acted like he didn’t even understand most of the words.

I asked him if he would like me to take him to the basement. The look he shot me said, “Mommy, my juice, and the gate I was working on before you butted in are all up here. What the hell would I want with the basement?”

Toy trains are another frustration to the boy. He loves playing with his big brother’s trains. Big Brother, in adherence to rule number one of The Boys’ Guide to Optimal Utilization of Toy Trains and Real Dads, owns several incompatible sets. The cars of one set won’t hook to the cars of another. This drives the one-year-old into a toddler-sized fit of apoplexy.

His dream is to make a single chain of all the diverse engines and cars in the house. He gets annoyed when he can’t get two cars to hook together. Then, he taps me with his hand and points to the troublesome connection. Since I can’t make incompatible trains fit together, I’m left trying to explain.

the problem with trains

All the connectors are the same color, but somehow that’s not enough. Were the baby Vanderbilts saddled with such trials?

Incidentally, if you want to know what frustrates a man in his 40s, it’s trying to explain compatibility to a toddler.

I finally got him to understand the color coding – blue hook doesn’t fit into white hole. Then he brought me two engines with only white holes as connectors, tapping me on the shoulder and pointing to the work he needed done. You should have seen his face when I tried to teach him that the two whites couldn’t connect without any hook pieces. Knowing what I know of his toddler language, I’m pretty sure he called me a lying sack of something or other before he flung the engines across the room.

How could any child build a viable transportation system with parents like this?

Boobies of knowledge

Our one-year-old doesn’t like saying goodbye to Mommy. Even if he doesn’t need her for anything specific, and even if he is happily playing with Daddy or Big Brother, he likes knowing that Mommy is at hand. Daddy can do everything for him that he needs done, but it’s hard to put 100% faith in somebody who doesn’t have boobies. Everyone knows that boobies are where parenting knowledge is stored, which means if Daddy forgets how to do something, he’s got no place he can go to look it up.

Two-volume set

“Think what you will. I refuse to hide my ample reference materials.” (Image: Stanley Kubrick/Look Magazine)

Thus, whenever Mommy leaves the house, she takes the entire archive of tips for keeping little boys happy and comfortable with her. She also takes a couple of really comfortable snuggling pillows, but that’s of secondary concern. The important thing is she’s leaving a fragile little boy in the hands of some dude who is likely to forget the recipe to baby’s comfort at any moment.

When Mommy needs to run an errand, she sometimes finds herself slipping out of the house quietly, to preserve the little boy from any unnecessary anxiety. This is what she thinks she’s doing. What she is actually doing is deferring the unnecessary anxiety until the child is completely in the care of a man whom the boy recognizes as wholly devoid of appropriate reference materials, since Mommy always carries those with her.

Whenever our little boy realizes he hasn’t seen Mommy for a while, he runs toward the door to the garage, since that is Mommy’s most likely escape route. If Mommy has gone out, Daddy needs to take some time to reassure the boy that he does indeed remember how to feed and diaper a child, notwithstanding his flat, bony chest. The boy always recovers his composure, but it can be an unpleasant 10 minutes of distress.

If Mommy is just someplace else in the house, Daddy only needs to make the boy understand that, or, as in the most recent case, let him figure it out for himself.

We have a low counter beside the door to the garage. Sometimes, Mommy sets her purse on this counter.  Last time the boy went to the door chasing a missing Mommy, he saw the purse sitting upon the counter. The purse was evidence, but it was not definitive proof.

carrying mommy's phone

“Mommy can’t be too far away if I’ve got her umbilical cord in my hand.”

The boy pulled the purse to the floor and opened it up. All the distress melted away from his countenance as he plucked out Mommy’s cell phone. This was proof. Mommy might leave home without her purse, but she would never ever leave her phone behind. A phone doesn’t make such a good snuggling pillow, but then grown-ups do have crazy ways.

He took the phone and climbed the stairs. He heard the shower running so he pounded on the bathroom door. When Mommy opened the door, he handed her the phone. He understands how troubling it is to be separated from your comforting boobies of knowledge.

Now, everybody could relax.

Let me throw a little compassion at you

Our one-year-old is developing a couple of traits that seem like an odd pair of characteristics for a little boy to form simultaneously. He loves to throw things, which seems quite normal. What is less usual is the level of compassion he shows when someone in his family is hurt or sad.

The boy loves playing catch, minus the part where he catches anything. He has quite a limber arm and throws a ball, or any other convenient object, with a healthy velocity. He is not picky about the projectile or the target.

Meanwhile, he is always ready with a hug whenever his big brother is upset, no matter how ridiculous the cause. But big boys never cry over silly things anyway, right? Toddler Boy kisses boo-boos to make them all better and is never stingy with a pat on the back when he has run through his repertoire of hugs and kisses.

mini catcher

Only one of these children came dressed to play with the likes of my little boy. For the rest, he would have only sympathy.

At first blush, these two traits seem as though they would have little overlap in daily life. That is, unless the boy grows to become a baseball pitcher who rushes to the plate to console batters he’s struck out, or a football quarterback who passes out hand-written thank-you notes to receivers who catch his passes.

In reality, these traits are just two sides of the same coin for an indiscriminate living room hurler. Like the other day, when he beaned me, point-blank, with plastic balloon pump. I still have the red mark on my temple to attest to his marksmanship. The moment he realized he’d hurt me, he was all over me with hugs and kisses. It really made for a sweet scene, or I’m assuming it did; my vision was still a little blurry.

He appears to be right-handed, although when he gets on the playground, he throws mulch equally well with both arms. I hope he quits throwing mulch soon, because mulch scatters like birdshot and he might wing kids other than the one he’s aiming for. As an upstanding parent, I’m all for minimizing collateral damage.

everything's a missle

When we run out of balloons to blow up, we use this handy device as a projectile to keep Daddy looking sharp.

The responsible adult in me wants to discourage him from throwing things so much, but the sports-fan father in me wants him to keep his arm loose. You can’t warm up by throwing air. We’ll try to steer him toward tossing various types of balls and away from chucking random bits of nature. We’ll also encourage him to throw toward folks who are ready and willing to catch what he’s pitching. This may take some time.

As he learns to blindside fewer people with heaved objects, he will have less cause to call upon his vast compassion for the injured. I hope this won’t make that trait fade from his character. I admire his compassion and hope he keeps it always, so long as it doesn’t prevent him striking out batters with heartless precision.

How Daddy’s reading comprehension skills died a slow death

Parents of multiple children can’t help but compare and contrast their offspring. I like to notice the ways my two boys are alike, because noting their differences often leads to the temptation to wish one could be more like the other, and if I’m going to pressure them to follow another child’s model, I want more well-behaved examples to point at.

There is a world of difference between the habits of a one-year-old and those of a four-year-old. Despite the age difference, there is one activity in which my boys take common delight.

Pulling out the bookmark

Colorful tabs were just made for pullin’.

Apparently, children of all ages find endless joy in pulling the bookmark out of the book their father is reading and replacing it between randomly selected pages in the book.

I am, or rather, I was, an avid reader. I used to tear through history books like there was nobody tugging on my arm or crying in my ear. I used to devour the classics like a man who need not condemn anybody to bed at an unjustly early hour, and then hear fifteen different appeals of the sentence as the night wears on.

One summer, I devoted a couple of months to reading Shelby Foote’s Civil War trilogy. If I tried to tackle those thousands of pages today, it would take me longer to read The Civil War than it took Lincoln’s reluctant generals to fight it. I would be a sorry historian to declare that The Civil War lasted eight years. But there were lots of extended breaks.

Civil War set

For childless readers only . . . unless you want to end up as just another casualty.

The irony is that before I had children, I didn’t rely so heavily upon bookmarks as I do now. Back then, I read so often that I could easily remember my place without a flag directing me where to resume. Now, I might go weeks between reading sessions. I need bookmarks not only to remind me what page I was on, but also which book I was reading.

There must be something about a little nub of paper or Mylar, or even a strand of lint, sticking out of a book that hypnotizes a child with the desire to pull it out. It does not matter how plain the bookmark appears, it still portrays itself as a magical tab that must be pulled. I might as well install buttons on my books and expect little boys not to push them.

In the end, a bookmark is a boring plaything. The boys rediscover this as soon as it is free of the book. Little brother might toss his disappointment to the four winds or hide it somewhere within the book, as the mood strikes him. Big brother has been yelled at enough that he covers his tracks by replacing the marker between pages, any pages.

Thus, I find myself wondering why some books are so repetitive, while others seem to leave huge gaps in the narrative. I’ve read a few books over the past several years in which the sequence of events was downright bizarre. Some men my age have mid-life crises. Not me. I’m just going through my post-modern phase.