Marley and Me

I just got finished watching Marley and Me and it reminded me of a couple things that I may have not thought of in a while.

1. Having little kids can be just as shitty and challenging and stressful and scary for the Dad as it is for the stay-at-home Mom. This can be hard to remember when you envy them for being able to drive by themselves in the car on the way to work.

2. It is the challenging ones that make an impression on our heart. It is the children or dogs or experiences that gave us a run for our money that we remember and forever leave a mark on our hearts. Nobody ever got anything worth having by just floating down the river and letting life pass them by.

I loved this movie and it was the first time in a long while that I thought it was a movie that was equally as good as the book.

SAMMY DO IT! The Trials and Tribulations of Having a Two Year Old

I find that having a two-year-old is equally exhausting as it is enjoyable. Recently she has begun to want to do everything on her own with the determination of an Olympic athlete.

Yesterday, she wanted to put on her own shoes. I have no problem with this, I even relish the idea that doing this will probably keep her occupied for at least ten minutes. Ecstatic at the idea that I will have ten whole minutes to accomplish something, I run to the closet and whip out the vacuum.

The whir and suck of the crumbs off the floor begin to sooth me until I am brought out of my vacuum induced meditation by a piercing, "MOM, HELP!"

I turn off the vacuum and begin in Sammy's direction. She waves me off. "No, Sammy do it." OK, I turn around to continue with my vacuuming.

"MOM, HELP!" I begin in her direction again. Again, I get the wave off. I let her do this one more time, until she has officially worn out my patients.

"NO! MOMMY HELP!" I say firmly and loudly as I set her in my lap. I have no problem with her trying to do things on her own, but this is ridiculous.

My husband runs in from the garage, "Were you yelling at my princess?" He asks with a grin. Indeed I was, my glare responds.

I can hear her now, crying upstairs as I try to finish writing this. I know when she comes down she is going to demand a breakfast she can get herself and to get her Barney fix. Half of me is tempted to open the door and throw her a string cheese, like you would a wild animal. The other half knows this will not hold her for nearly long enough.

I guess I will have to succumb to her cries...

The Toddler who cried, "MOM!"

My baby girl has one of the sweetest voices. She can melt your heart with her little, “night, night Mommy.” And I can’t hear her say, “Elmo cake.” Enough. I kept asking her, “What kind of cake did we get?” However, when I am recovering from a migraine I can’t help but compare her voice to one of the chipmunks.

I was sitting on the couch recovering from one such migraine (a whole other story) and she kept repeating over and over, “Mom, color on paper?”

“No Sammy do not color on paper.”

“MOM, color on paper?”

“No Sammy, put the marker down.”

“MOM! COLOR ON PAPER!

“Fine!” I reply in my best parenting moment.

All I wanted to do was sit on the couch and nurse my still throbbing head. Although she is now coloring on the paper, she has not stopped talking. I manage through some Zen parenting to tune out the particularly high pitch of her voice so I can finally relax.

After a while I notice that the squeaking is coming at a much more rapid pace and the volume has increased. I look over at my Mom who is sitting on the couch next to me, “What is she saying?” So we stop, and try to make out the latest ranting. Soon it becomes clear what she is wailing,

“I’m STUCK!”

We both look over in her direction and notice that in her attempt to get down from the barstool where she was coloring paper, she got her little body lodged under the armrest. Her feet are dangling and her arms are thrust up over her head. My Mom ran over and disentangled her from the chair.

I wondered to myself, how long had she been yelling to me and how long had I been tuning her out. If only she could save her precious words for when they really mattered this would not have happened. It seemed to me a classic case of the toddler who cried, “MOM!”