Back from a very nice holiday break! It’s funny – I don’t normally get a chance to spend that much time with my daughter (day in, day out, all day). Six words: God Bless Stay At Home Parents.
After a few days of non-stop kid-dom, a few observations on raising a toddler.
You know you are a parent of a toddler when:
- You know all nursery rhymes/child songs by heart. This goes without saying. A slightly less obvious observation is that you get so sick of certain songs that you spontaneously compose new lyrics just to freshen things up – think “The Wheels on the bus have been jacked by thieves, jacked by thieves, jacked by thieves!”
- A hot mess in a ten pound pant is a source of parental pride
- Mac and cheese is a food group
- Rummaging through your once It Bag (the last expensive thing you bought for yourself), in the midst of a wallet and lip gloss you find a half full bag of prunes. You decide to keep the sticky prunes in the Spendy Bag because you never know when your child may need reinforcements.
- You walk into a non-child friendly house (e.g. grandparents with lots of things on counters) and do a 007-like scan of all of the objects in the room that your child is likely to pickup/throw/break/hurt herself or others with/steal/swallow and you implement "The Sweep".
- You can smell Cheerios a mile away.
- Your NYC apartment has a parking space for strollers. These strollers are part of your furniture scheme and storage strategy.
- You seriously contemplate Mister Potato Head’s value as an object of contemporary art (retro Murakami?) and leave it on your mantle in the living room.
- You think nothing of eating the apple peels your child discards as she eats the real part of the apple. You used to be grossed out by sloppy seconds but now you are, well, a parent.
- You trade in the Jeep Wave from your 20s to the Toddler Nod in your 30s. This Toddler Nod is frequently found while pushing your toddler down a street passed other toddlers in strollers. Parents nod to each other in solidarity typically as children ask sweetly to “GET OUT!” of the stroller or demand “SWINGS!” as you head to the grocery store (The Nod says “Yes, I know. Good luck.” In Super Parent Town Park Slope Brooklyn The Nod can be more of The Sneer as Granola Uber Moms think “Just LOOK at that poor child in man-made fabrics. The horror.”)
- The 2 hour mid-day nap no longer means you are chilling out recovering from your hangover (though having a hangover may still be true); rather, it means time to fold the laundry/start dinner/fake a manicure/finish a house project/unload the dishwasher/deal with work email/do 10 push-ups (counts as a workout, right?)/vacuum/ clean apple sauce from the cabinets (HUH?)/and take a shower. Bottom line: you get more done in a 2 hour naptime than you used to get done over an entire weekend in your world of "BK" (before kids).
And we just have one. How do people with several kids do it? Really!?!? Write in tips to let me know.
Kylie, first let me say that I love those six words you chose. Many people feel that being a stay at home parent means you don't do anything, but honestly I found it easier to go to work. I would come home and my daughter was fed, bathed, read to, changed and ready for me to just love. Now I am a slave 24/7. I have two kids and going from 1 to 2 was way harder than adjusting to 1 kid. But a little over a year later I find that I have my routines and I manage quite well as long as my oldest goes to school a few days a week and they both take naps. Drinking regularly during happy hour time helps as well. It makes the dinner/bed time routine a lot more tolerable :) Happy parenting!
Posted by: Jen Williams | January 04, 2010 at 01:26 PM
Kylie, thanks for making me laugh out loud several times.
Posted by: Bart | January 04, 2010 at 04:06 PM
The secret to handling two kids is spacing their births out enough so the older one eagerly takes care of the younger. Unpaid child labor ROCKS!
Posted by: Tereza | January 04, 2010 at 05:29 PM