Yes, it’s June and yes, we’ve had some rainy, humid days but that’s not what I’m talking about.
I’ve been in charge of the grandbabies for four days now. Their Mom couldn’t come up from Texas until today and their Dad had to leave town on business so I got them all to my greedy, greedy self for four days and three nights.
We’ve had a blast but I’d forgotten just how demanding tiny kids are.
It’s not that they can neither feed, dress nor clean themselves. In fact, Babydoll can and does dress herself and I’d bet that if she had to, she could figure out how to get the Tupperware full of cereal open. She’s potty trained, too. Babalouie, on the other hand, needs help in all those catagories but that’s not the hard part.
They spend all their time, every bit of their imagination and all their considerable energy on finding new and interesting ways to kill themselves.
I was in the TV room, watching both of them as Babalouie launched himself up and over a little wooden footstool, coming a hair’s breadth from smacking his skull on the rocker blade. I scooped him up in the nick of time and set him safely on the ground. In the fraction of a second that it took me to do that, Babydoll wrapped two dozen strings of plastic beads around her neck, twice.
She had found Zack’s old Mardi Gras stash.
Don’t bother telling me it’s Katie’s old Mardi Gras stash, I prefer to believe they were Zack’s beads.
I told Babydoll not to move and not to touch the beads herself, then I careful unwound and removed them one by one.
The last three strings had to be cut apart; I couldn’t get them untwisted.
What bothered me wasn’t that what they did was so dangerous or particularly unusual for a toddler, it was the fact that they did it while I was right there, watching them both.
Little kids are not a full time job. Forty hours a week is considered full time. Watching toddlers requires forty hours a day.
Don’t give me that nonsense about there only being 24 hours in a day; toddler’s make minced meat of the time/space continuum.
Don’t bother saying that they have to sleep sometime. It’s certainly true that they get a lot of sleep but if they aren’t sleeping at the same time, you’re still on the clock.
Say you’re dealing with a one year old who takes two long naps a day (Yay!) and his three year old sister who takes one even longer nap a day. This may lull you into thinking you’d get some time to do something fun, like clean up all the food under the kitchen table or brush your teeth but that’s because you’re assuming there would be some overlap.
There’s not.
Ever.
Babalouie naps from ten to noon and again from two to three. Babydoll plays like a tornado all day long and crashes at 3:30 until dinner time around seven. You think, ‘Oh, look how sweet she is! Poor little angel, must be exhausted.’ She seems a lot less angelic when she’s still partying like Lindsay Lohan at Midnight.
I had one like that.
When Tyler and Katie were tiny and we finally bought a house that enabled them to have separate bedrooms, we had one rule: Katie didn’t have to go to sleep at bedtime, she just had to stay in her room.
There were plenty of nights when we could still hear her playing in her room when we went to bed around 11:30.
She was three at the time.
The funniest thing about Katie is that when she finally fell asleep, it was instantaneous. She would simply drop wherever she was. It wasn’t at all unusual to find her on her bedroom floor. Sometimes, we’d find her in her closet and once she spent the night asleep on the bathroom floor, fingers still curled around the cup of water she’d been after. The funniest time of all was the week of Halloween, 1988. We were in my bed, watching a movie and she announced that she had to go potty. She was on the far side of the bed from the door. She jumped out of bed but didn’t come running around the bed and out the door. After a few moments, I looked over the side of the bed and there she was. She’d fallen asleep in midair.
Babydoll doesn’t fall asleep quite that fast but when she does sleep, she may as well be in a coma for all that you can wake her. And a nap in the afternoon will keep her running far into the night.
After the first night, I knew that it would probably be best not to let her nap but…
It was the only time she stopped talking.
That’s by far the funniest, most entertaining yet most demanding part of caring for toddlers; you’re their audience. They expect your full attention and I mean complete and utter, laser like focus all the time. They know when you’re just going through the motions and they won’t stand for it.
Imagine being in a room with Jerry Seinfeld performing in the front and Louis CK performing at the back; both are great and you’re laughing you head off. But every time you try to turn from one to watch the other, he screams at you and tries to kill himself.
And the show lasts for eighteen hours.
It’s not a very good analogy because of course, after the first hour, you’d just let Louis CK accidentally hang himself.
But with these two adorable, brilliant, huggy, kissy babies, you just hope you get a good night’s sleep so you can enjoy it again tomorrow.
Very quickly, you learn to do without the unnecessary things, like food, bathroom breaks and cleanliness.
After the first day, it doesn’t bother you that there are tiny bits of bologna stuck to the floor under the kitchen table, that a box of dominoes has been dispersed like pollen on the porch, every towel you own is on the bathroom floor and every chair in the house is covered in stuffed animals. You notice these things, you just don’t care. These things are all trivial when Babalouie is insisting that you try on hats with him and Babydoll is demonstrating her knowledge of all the songs and dances from the Wizard of Oz.
But there’s a good reason we’re supposed to have our kids when we’re young and energetic. Now I know why I was so thin back in my twenties; I never got to sit down and eating was something I watched other people do.
The first night, when I got into bed, every muscle in my body ached. I haven’t done so much bending, squatting and lifting in decades. Couple all that physical exertion with the nervous energy emitted trying to keep them from falling, strangling or drowning and you’ve got one wrung out Nana.
When Babalouie woke up in the middle of the night, slightly feverish from teething, I gave him some Tylenol and a bottle, thinking he’d go right back to sleep. An hour later, he did. Three hours later, his sister was up, asking for breakfast.
She wanted some Honey Bunny in a Boat.
Oddly enough, in my sleep deprived head, that made perfect sense to me and I poured her a bowl of Honey Bunches of Oats. She only spilled a little of it when she tried to drink the milk after the cereal was gone.
Babalouie’s fever was gone when he woke up again; he gives very sloppy kisses.
We can’t stop laughing.
Every surface in the house is covered with a thin film of mucus and apple juice.
Everything is sticky.