A Tale of Woe and Betrayal, Laundry Edition

Something glorious is happening in my house right now. I've been waiting two weeks for this, and it's finally happening. My clothes are getting washed!

About two weeks ago I pulled some clothes out of the dryer and found huge dirty oil spots all over them. I checked the clothes still in the washer, and they were even worse. Some kind of oil was leaking from my machine into the washtub. I suddenly had a dirtying machine instead of a washing machine.

This is just a small sample of the horrors.

At the time, I was pretty freaked out about two loads of MY clothes getting ruined. I'm still not happy about that but the last two weeks have given me a little perspective. I wasn't worried about the washer because I knew I could just call a repairman and get it fixed, because that's what adults do. No problem. I have a phone and a check book.

But after waiting two days for the repairman to show up, he took approximately 45 seconds to look in my machine and tell me it was toast. The transmission was shot or something.  I didn't even know washing machines have a transmission, but you learn something new every day. Sometimes what you learn is boring. That's another aspect of being an adult.

So later that same day the hubster and I took our brood of frisky children to a local appliance place that sells scratch-and-dent machines. We love this store because we get much nicer appliances for less money as long as we're willing to have a ding on the front. I proudly show off the ding on the front of my stainless-steel-french-door-freezer-on-the-bottom refrigerator, because it not only saved us $500, but it also saved us the trouble of worrying about our kids putting a ding in the door of an expensive new fridge. If I don't feel like looking at the dent I cover it with a magnet.

As our children roamed the store, racing up and down the aisles and pushing buttons on appliances, Kit and I carefully picked out a new washer using our tried-and-true technique: looking for the cheapest one. That day it happened to be a nice new front-loading high-efficiency washer, because the store was running an Earth Day special. Yay, us! We put the washer into the back of the van and took it home like hunters returning from a successful hunt, full of pride.

We dragged the old washer up out of the basement and to the curb, and put the new washer in the garage to wait for a better time to wrangle it, since it was already past the kids' bedtime. The next day the kids and I went to the garage to visit it, and I couldn't help but caress it a little. It was so beautiful, so clean, so efficient. "We're going to make beautiful laundry together," I murmured to it.
But all along, the new washer was hiding a dark secret.

Kit and some friends got the machine down into the basement and the next day before he went to work we leveled it and removed the bolts that keep the tub in place during transport. We couldn't get the last rubber spacer out right then, so while Kit was gone I spent a couple of hours wiggling it and yanking it and levering it and finally I got it out. I held it high in the air triumphantly, like Gollum and the One Ring. And just like Gollum, I immediately plunged into a pit of fiery torment, because after I hooked everything up the MACHINE WAS BROKEN. It just constantly filled with water, even unplugged. The whole time I was caressing that machine it was quietly snickering to itself.

Several phone calls and one week later, just as the laundry piles were starting to need signs warning travelers of the avalanche danger, I finally have a washer that works! It needed a new valve or something that had to be ordered. And now that washer really is beautiful. I just wish it hadn't required so much adulting to get clean clothes.

Maybe we don't need the TV anymore??

The Twos Are (Not?) Terrible

I had a really sappy post drafted up about how two-year-olds get a bad rap. This is my third time parenting through the Twos, and I get a lot of pleasure from two-year-olds. The post was sweet and loving and was going to be filled with pictures of my little guy. He has a goofy sense of humor, he loves to help (especially if he gets to vacuum), he gets excited about the tiny wonders of life (like the ants that keep crawling under the back door), and he's just the right size to scoop up and tickle-kiss.

It's a wondrous journey of self-discovery

BUT

Then I had to haul him out of various establishments like a bouncer and it reminded me why two-year-olds can be rotten stinkers. Just about every day last week he did a public impression of a screaming octopus, wailing and screeching and kicking and thrashing. And through it all I had to paste a calm look on my face. "I've got this totally under control. I don't mind that he's kicking me. I'm not resenting my toddler for humiliating me in public, because that would be silly."

Go ahead. Punish me.

And then there were the incredible things I had to clean up because of him. I feel like his entourage sometimes, following after him and trying to fix things he's messed up, apologizing to bystanders, replacing things he's broken.

WHY SO SERIOUS??

But even at the worst moments there are bits of joy showing through, I just have to remember to recognize them. Aww, he's so cute with that nail polish he thought was lip gloss.

Lessons from Mary Poppins

Mary Poppins is my idol. 
She was confident and assertive, but knew fun and magic can be found anywhere. I would love to emulate her more in my life. Of course, Mary Poppins had a couple of advantages over me. I mean, she had supernatural abilities and a three-octave singing voice, for goodness sake. She slid UP the bannister, levitated tea-tables, and charmed children, bankers, and birds with her singing. My musical repertoire is pretty much limited to "Itsy Bitsy Spider" and "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star." My super powers are making food appear every night at dinner, and the ability to make my two-year-old disappear simply by holding a tissue in my hand. So I'm trying to focus on learning some of her more attainable skills.

On Self Esteem

Mary Poppins told people she was "kind but extremely firm" and "practically perfect in every way." Of course, since references are "a very old-fashioned idea, to my mind," we only have her word for it. So maybe she isn't quite as great as she says. I bring this up because it's important to have a positive attitude toward yourself, to say good things about yourself. I find myself talking to myself, about myself, in a way that would be totally unacceptable from another human being. When I make a mistake, in my head I sometimes call myself an idiot. I don't think I'm alone in this. But if more of us looked in the mirror every morning, sang a duet with our reflection, and then declared ourselves to be "practically perfect in every way," the world would be considerably closer to awesome. Persuading oneself to be great is an amazing skill.

On Cleaning Up

The most memorable scene in the movie is probably when they tidy up the nursery. Mary Poppins tells Jane and Michael that "A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down," and "In every job that must be done there is an element of fun."
Turning chores into games totally works on my kids, as long as I make the effort to make it a compelling game. This doesn't mean complicated, or that I've developed super snapping abilities. (sigh. I wish. Is there a YouTube video tutorial out there?) Let's talk about the dress-up clothes that spend so much time on the floor that I'm pretty sure that hundreds of years from now future archaeologists will study the strata of tiaras and dresses and magician costumes in the remains of our house and write scholarly papers about The Use of Synthetic Fibers in Children's Ceremonial Garb in the Early Twenty-First Century.

There's a PhD in there somewhere

On occasion I decide that it is time to check the floor of April's room, to make sure the carpet is still the color I remember and that the squirrels aren't hiding under a pile of capes, and I gather my brood.  This is crucial: if I tell them to clean this mess, without a game or instructions, not only will the mess not get picked up, but it will immediately spread throughout the house because the girls will stop cleaning and start playing after approximately 37 seconds. So this is where the "element of fun" comes in.

"Okay guys, I'm setting the stopwatch! Let's see if we can beat our best time of one minute, fifty-six seconds! Remember, pick up a whole armful, not one little thing at a time. Ready-Set-GO!!"

And it works, which blows my mind. I mean, basically I'm getting them to clean up by telling them, in a super chipper voice, to do it super fast. This wouldn't work on me if I was, say, doing the dishes or mopping the kitchen or working on our taxes. If you told me I could get these things done by just going faster, I would roll my eyes at you. So. Hard. "What a revelation," I would say. And then I would gather my wits about me, turn off the instinctive sarcasm, and ask you to demonstrate for me on the dishes. I would pull a stool up to the kitchen island and make interested and admiring noises while you showed me how to put dishes in the dishwasher really quickly without breaking them. I would eat a cookie while telling you how amazing you are, and that I could never be as fast as you. Maybe you should do the dishes again tomorrow so I can watch and maybe figure out your technique, which seems super sophisticated.

On Bedtime

Bedtime seems like a simple task: put on pajamas, brush teeth, get in bed, turn off the light. But the reality is that there are days I would rather try to train a herd of cats than try to put my children to bed, because CPS wouldn't come calling if I gave up and put the cats in cages and walked out for an hour. The simplest things take an hour to accomplish. The kids suddenly remember things that absolutely have to be done right now. "I need to go through this stack of Scholastic book order forms and circle the ones I want!" (spoiler: they want the books that come with toys and gizmos.) They forget that they were putting on pajamas and play legos with their trousers around their knees and then get angry when I remind them to get dressed. ("I AM!" they insist indignantly, then go back to building a spaceship that fires flowers.) They dawdle, brushing each tooth individually. They remember how much they love us and have to come back downstairs three or four times to give hugs and kisses. (It would be more adorable if it didn't happen a full hour after we tucked them in.) They develop ailments and itches that torture them into wakefulness.

This is where the best Mary Poppins bit comes in. In the movie, after taking Jane and Michael on a outing to the park, the children are so wound up they can't calm down to sleep. She finally tells them, "Now, not another word or I shall be forced to summon a policeman." This is seriously my favorite line in the whole movie. It isn't so much applicable as it is hilariously reassuring. It gives me a great deal of comfort to know that even Mary Poppins got frustrated at bedtime, and resorted to outlandish empty threats in order to get peace and quiet. She was practically perfect, not totally perfect.

This makes me feel a lot better.

This is a Serious Post

Let's get real for a moment. It's time for a Serious Post. I'm going to talk about a hard subject.

My oldest child has ADHD. This means that people are allowed to just walk up to me and give me parenting advice and criticism. Generally the advice follows one of three styles:

1. If you disciplined her more/better/the way I disciplined MY kids, she wouldn't act like that
2. You shouldn't medicate her, you should accept her and take joy in her specialness
3. ADHD is made up

This kind of commentary also implies that I am parenting wrong. After someone says something like that to me, I laugh it off and get on with my life. Oh, wait. No, I usually cry the whole way home.

So I thought I would take a moment to show you all a TINY glimpse of what it's like for me to parent my particular almost-nine-year-old with ADHD. Please do not try to generalize this experience, because for heaven's sake, all kids and parents are different.

I took the kids swimming one day last week and on the way back we stopped at my aunt's workplace, a small upscale candy and sweet shop. The shop had a lot of nutcrackers, mostly up on shelves, and one big one in solid wood that had to be five feet tall, standing by the door. Kimmy ping-ponged around the shop, picking things up and putting them down, completely oblivious to my efforts to get her to quiet down and act more appropriately. Her behavior was rubbing off on her siblings, too, and I was pretty embarrassed that we were creating such a spectacle in front of the other store patrons. I apologized to my aunt (who is a laid-back saint of a woman) and explained that Kimmy wasn't on her meds that day.

"Oh, I thought she was just excited to be here!" she smiled. We laughed about it, and I explained my theory of Kimmy's behavior, namely that when she isn't on her medication, I appear to be escorting a drunken third-grader around town.

That's right. It's like she's drunk: slurred speech, poor motor control, loud talking, loss of inhibition.

I told my aunt about this, and we looked over at Kimmy. She was at the big nutcracker by the door, with her arms draped around it, kissing it on the mouth. "He's sho biig!! Look how big an' srong he i'!" she called loudly to the two ladies who were leaving the store. She tossed her hair back and leaned over to sloppily kiss the nutcracker's hand. "Wook, Mom! I kissin' his han'!"

I wish I was inventing this, or at least exaggerating, but this is exactly what happened. She is sweet and funny and creative, but sometimes she's an unruly drunk.