I cannot believe how quickly time has passed. We're on to new things and different lessons, but some of the themes stay the same. I am so thankful that I no longer have 3 kids under 3. All of them are now successfully potty trained, but still retain their witty little ditties they do. I laughed out loud, remembering writing this.
August 16th, 2008
Treasures and Terrors
In these great days of raising three healthy, bouncing children, I am beginning to wonder if there is something wrong with my programming. I think I was born without one very important gene: the MOMMY gene. I thought moms were warm, cozy enveloping sweaters of comfort, ever enduring love that always smelled and looked nice. As I look around at the craziness that has become my life, I am pretty sure that I don’t remember my mom yelling at us frequently or looking permanently like she was going to blow her lid. Some days I wake up just not ready to wrap my head around the new mini mind battles that are about to take place. They’ve been happening with greater force, with less and less time in between them. My kids have had a serious case of pushing boundaries often reducing me to tears through the last week. As they torture each other, I find myself wistfully dreaming that I had gone back to work for that $500 a month after paying daycare and let someone else go crazy with a bunch of kids almost the same age.
While dealing with a brutal force of allergies that I can’t remember dealing with before, Carson, 15 months, has been waking up a couple times a morning with high loud pitched screams of torture for the last week or so while he tries to push some monster teeth through his little gums. He woke me up at 5.30 am the other day. Anthem, the three year old mouth, spent a good part of that day in the corner for not listening. Tristen, the two year old exhibitionist, wouldn't keep her clothes on during a play date. Then she came in with a mouthful of just dirt, acting a little odd, so I was positive she ate something she wasn't supposed to. Only a day later, Anthem woke up at the crack of dawn and took it upon herself to wake everyone else up. Through my morning fog I had an intense desire to scream, kick and cry as I heard her go wake her sister, then creep in to her brother’s room, ruining any chance of waking peacefully and blissfully rested at 8 o’clock in the morning.
I am pretty sure I busted one of their little mastermind operations today. This all started when my kids discovered the snap peas that were growing through the garden fence. They took delight in their own private buffet outside. Being the little vegetable enthusiasts that they were, they KNEW that there were better treats inside the fence. Because it was just a bit too quiet out there, I walked around the back yard towards my garden. Anthem, being the wise coordinator that she is at four years old, took off running from the garden fence, yelling “TRISTEN DID IT”. I see my little blonde haired terror bolt from the greenhouse, tomatoes in hand, trying to scale the fence quicker than I get through the garden gate. Carson is just standing there, taking it all in, wondering why he didn’t get his tomato. Sitting on the fence, in a tidy little row, is all the ripe cherry tomatoes that the little grubber could find. The trail of green tomatoes coming out of the greenhouse was more evidence leading to what I really didn’t want to find inside. My only ripe tomato plant had been limbed in search of the greater treats.
Two years ago, I had a similar experience with my first garden. My children have this love for anything and everything vegetable. I was just beginning to cultivate my green thumb. The green onions that grew and grew and grew boosted my pride and confidence in gardening. Every morning I would go outside, tend to my garden and watch the girls play happily in the yard. In the afternoons, I would let them run in and out of the house while I prepared dinner. One evening, I went out to find that they had uprooted almost my entire prized crop and had savored the ends of them as well. GREEN ONIONS! What kids eat green onions? Apparently mine do. I was crushed. My husband, being the loving kind man that he is, had gone out there and gingerly placed the remaining bulbs back into the ground; reassuring me that they would still grow. The next day, my dog took the liberty of digging them up as well. That is when the garden fence became a must.
My kids have impressed me lately with their climbing abilities. The garden fence was cake compared to what they learned to scale first. We have a kennel out in the middle of the yard. It’s fairly tall and pretty impenetrable to other critters. It started out a dog kennel, and then we started housing the new chickens in there. Their roosting box and their food is also in there temporarily until we get the chicken coop started. Right now, they free range in the yard. My kids really enjoy the chickens. They also enjoy the kennel. I started locking it, because it was just gross to look out there and see the kids eating the produce discards that I threw out there for my flock. My husband started a “roof” of sorts for the kennel months ago, in hopes that it would become the floor for the ultimate playhouse. As most of these grand intentions start out, they soon fizzle out when the funds do or another project gets started and there is usually a fair amount of work left undone. My kids think it is really cool regardless, because the floor/roof, whatever you want to call it, isn’t completely done and doesn’t cover the whole kennel. They learned that since I locked the door in front, they could just climb the kennel, drop over the other side and climb down. It’s a little disturbing to look out there and see my children running around in the kennel knowing that they didn’t open the door.
In the whole theme of the insatiable hunger, because I obviously do not feed my children frequently enough, I have been discovering that food disappears rather quickly in our household. Not at the normal rate for starving children, but like I had a tour of preschoolers come through and ravish the snack shelf of my pantry. The other day, while searching for dirty laundry, I found shriveled up grapes under the girls’ bunk beds. They weren’t quite to the raisin point yet. This morning, I went out to get the chickens some cracked corn and found that my children had noticed that we store the food in there. There were three little granola bars, still in wrappers, lying right next to the food bag. I am not sure if they were tucked away there for the chickens, or in case the kids needed a power snack to push their poor shriveling limbs back up the wall of the kennel to get out next time.
Climbing hasn’t been the only problem I have had lately. In addition to the climbing, nudity has become all the rage at my house. It hasn’t really bothered me much as long as I am not required to participate. I figure that you only get to wish you could do that when you become an adult. We are fortunate enough to live on a place with more than an acre for my kids and animals to run on. It’s fantastic. Though we have a busy road that backs up to the pasture, the place has been fenced really well. The pasture is L-shaped and impenetrable for deer, random critters and unwanted visitors. We also have some really good trees to pretty much block the view from the traffic that zips along blissfully unaware that our little place is tucked in here. It’s when the nudity and climbing combined that it really started becoming not so fun or cute.
One day, Anthem came in to let me know that Tristen had climbed the tree next to the hot tub. I figured she was stuck or something, so I rushed out to see what the problem was. She was in a pine tree with nothing but her birthday suit on. As soon as she saw me, she hopped down and said “HI MOM!” That was a little odd. It was more disturbing, though, to look out while doing my morning chores and see the girls playing nude out in the pasture with the dogs. At one point, Tristen decided that it was time for business. That is when her world turned into one great big outhouse. I am not really thrilled with this new point of view. Since then, I have seen her drop her panties on the deck twice. It’s become this new adventure to her. My husband, being a pole barn builder, often takes the kids on ride a longs out to a job site. After this week, of dealing with the peeing wonders, I was leery of the excursion and told him to watch her like a hawk. Thankfully, we had no incidents while out on the job. I thought boys were the ones that you had to worry about that stuff with. I am on girl number two that thinks that is one great trick and I am not even sure I want to start thinking about potty training the little guy.
My kids’ athletic skills are not the only things that they have been showing off. Anthem has a pretty keen mind and has great radar for picking things up. In the same trip out to the job site, we were patiently waiting for lumber, sitting in the shade during the record setting heat wave of this summer. Anthem turned and looked at me, saying “Whew! It’s hot out here! I’m sweatin’ like a pig!” She must have picked that one up from a movie. My all time favorite display of understanding this week was when I was in the other room, getting ready to leave and I overheard Anthem say “Daddy, my attitude stinks sometimes.” After having a challenging week of wondering whether or not my children have hearing problems or I am not being clear enough, there was a bright window of hope that opened. Of course, there was a glimpse of that earlier in the week, when Anthem told Tristen to stop doing something because it was irritating her. For a four year old, her diction is very impressive. Not only that, but she definitely gets an A on verbal application. I wish the same application was dedicated to listening.
Tristen, on the other hand, is still learning to master the art of parroting. She’s got a couple of phrases that are down really well. Try not snorting when your two-year-old turns to you with a twinkle in her eye and starts counting, “1…2…3…” then asks “Do you want a spanking?” or I really found this one funny, “You want a whoopin?” I am guilty of threatening the first one, but I am not quite sure where the second one came from. Tristen’s best phrase right now is one that will forever be dear to my heart. My kids’ John Deere wagon is one of their most prized possessions. It is only natural that it would be used as a reference point in Tristen’s ever expanding vocabulary. The other day, Wayne called her a ragamuffin. Immediately, she turned around and looked him in the eye and said adamantly in her little Tristen voice, “I not a wagon muffin, I TISTEN!”
As I have faced all of these challenges in a week, I am much more thankful that I have great parents that are still alive to tell me that I turned out okay and that they are proud of me. I keep telling myself that's why it is worth all of the insanity. That one day, the child with incredible obstinacy and an obvious hearing problem, will be a mother just like myself and my mother, with incredible wit. I will be able to offer complete sympathy and comfort in my ultimate wisdom of all things. They provide living proof I will make it. I will most likely have an even greater cultivated sense of humor in addition to tons of lovely examples to pass on to my children one day when they face similar trials.
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