A few weeks ago, J was “Star Student” of his kindergarten class. This coveted position involves showcasing treasured possessions from home, sharing pictures of friends and family, and having the teacher read your favorite book to the class. Friday culminates with classmates gifting the Star Student a book of adorably clunky kindergarten illustrations inspired by the Star Student him/herself.
Dave and I excitedly opened J’s book with him on Friday evening.
“Oh my gosh, how sweet is this?!” I said. “Look! There you are wearing blue, your favorite color. And you love Legos! And I see ice cream, and a pineapple, and a burger… this is such a nice drawing from so-and-so.”
“Ha!” Dave and I laughed at page 2. “McDonald’s burger and fry! So-and-so has your number.”
By the time we got to page 3, an illustration of literally nothing except McDonald’s fries, we got suspicious. “J, did you tell your class we eat a lot of McDonald’s or something?”
“No, I didn’t.”
Well, you can probably guess how the majority of the rest of the pages of his Star Student book looked.
J insists he did not tell his class he likes McDonald’s, nor that we eat a lot of McDonald’s, nor that he mentioned McDonald’s at all. I proceeded to ask his classmate at the bus stop the following Monday. She confirmed there was no mention of J having an unusually high inclination for fast food known to be almost entirely nutritionally void.
I am therefore equal parts mystified as to what the muse was behind this clear trend of McDonald’s, and expecting that our final parent-teacher conference this year will include a surprise discussion around the importance of healthy habits in child nutrition.
Hack #5: Space is the Secret to 1:1 QT
I am one of five children and a bona fide middle child. While I know there were daily choices my parents made to ensure none of us felt like we were anything less than a top priority, my mom set a particularly amazing precedent: the “Getaway.”
“Getaways” with Mom were epic when we were kids. Getaways were 1:1 overnights, and the general tone was “treat yo’self” before that phrase was in vogue. My siblings and I talked about these for months (years) afterwards and they live on in our shared narrative.
My Getaway memory — crystal clear even 20+ years later — is as follows:
- We went on an extensive trip to an exotic location
- We saw Homeward Bound in theater
- She let me buy something from the quarter machines at a store when I asked (that was a hard pass in any other context… and now that I’m a parent, I understand why)
- We talked about everything I wanted to talk about, and ate what I wanted to eat
- We went to a hotel (with a pool!!!!) and stayed the night
- I had a great time
I found out many years later that we had only gone as far as Ann Arbor, <1 hour from home.
So when I wanted to get some QT with A, our resident Daddy’s Boy, I knew just what to do.
Friday I picked up A from school early and we hit the road! We went to a hotel not far away and swam in the rocking indoor pool with a massive shallow end. We got room service pizza and pasta and ate on the hotel bed like it didn’t matter if we spilled. We shared a slice of chocolate cake that was not contingent upon him finishing some portion of his entree. We stayed up late and slept like logs. We had continental breakfast and I didn’t blink when he wanted to spoon his strawberry yogurt into the dregs of his orange juice. We went for an extended joyride on the elevator. We swam again and played out roughly 70 scenarios where our pool noodles were hoses extinguishing fires. We listened to his favorite tunes all the way home (who knew?).
Could A articulate what we did by the time he got home and Dave asked how his adventure was with Mom? No.
Did my 2 year old tell me in no uncertain terms that he would be riding a motorcycle when he “got bigger” because we saw two on the drive? Yes.
Did this Getaway help reestablish our bond that has never been the same since C came along? Perhaps not.
But did he have a good enough time that he requested I join him in a resounding and very public “hip hip, HOORAY!” chorus over our breakfast orange juices?? You bet he did.
While I still believe a case can be made for reusing Easter basket grass each year, I’ve recently learned that this is absolutely NOT true for reusing chocolate.
Imagine the volume of questions Dave must have been dying to ask when J opened his treat, and then looked up at us, immediately crestfallen by this powdery mass of chocolate dust that disintegrated upon being touched. Luckily for me, Dave has my 6 (“for better or worse” comes to mind) and quickly reminded all of us that the Easter Bunny takes care of a LOT of people and manages a LOT of varied preferences and is probably very busy at work lately and can sometimes make mistakes, too.
When I was little, my siblings and I had generously-sized Easter baskets, but my younger brother’s put the rest of ours to shame. It was both long and wide, and shallow, so it looked like a small boat floating on the carpet of our living room. I admit I had some basket envy until my mom once mentioned that the problem with his enormous basket was — in her efforts to divide all the basket contents equally — his never looked full.
For whatever reason, this is one of those off-hand remarks made by a parent that sticks with you, so when I picked out baskets for my own children many years later, I pointedly opted for relatively small sizes.
What makes the cut in our small baskets?
Every year:
- Astronaut ice cream (no seasonal significance, but a tradition nonetheless).
- A few sweets.
- A token gift – usually something related to the warming weather and more time spent outside. This year: gallons of bubble juice refills. Last year: kids binoculars for outside adventures. The year before: a water table to compensate for being in the thick of COVID lock-downs and desperately needing new ways to entertain them for extended periods.
- The same Easter grass as last year (is this cheap? Or just not wasteful? Jury is out).
And, of course, for C who neither consumes sweets nor needs any new amusement given the over-abundance of hand-me-down toys in our home, an assortment of his favorite Puffs and Yogurt Melts.
For the record, 2 of my favorite Easter basket memories growing up were when I got the Beatles White Album in my basket during high school, and when my mom filled our baskets as adults with fancy cheese, crackers, meats, and a bottle of wine.
From our home, which I thought had a set number of hidden eggs in it as of this morning, but found out when the boys exceeded that number that Dave hid an additional (amount unknown) set from the grandparents… Happy Easter. If you visit in the coming weeks and find an egg, there will be a cash reward.
We got our eggs colored this year just under the wire, with only 5 eggs broken in the process, minimal bickering about who had access to which color, and just one expletive-riddled sigh after the boys ran off to play and Dave thought the spilled liquid may have permanently stained our new countertop (for the sake of the holiday, I’m glad to say it did not).
But now the boys are in bed and I am left to reflect on something that has puzzled me since becoming a parent:
All those years with me and my siblings as little kids, when we’d wake up on Easter Sunday and peer from the upstairs hallway down into the living room, excitedly pointing out where we could spot the brightly colored eggs stashed around the room… how did my parents pull that off?
Did they set their alarm for the wee hours as we still slept, creep around hiding our (5 x dozen) colored eggs, and then go back to bed, only to have us wake them shortly thereafter to go find said eggs? Surely they wouldn’t have hid them before going to bed, otherwise they’d be left out an extended period and are, in fact, a food very much at risk of going bad when left out. But – also surely – my parents are not the type of people to voluntarily forgo sleep for anything frivolous, as evinced by the fact that they were known to set all of the clocks in the house back 1 hour on Christmas Eve so that they could sleep 1 additional hour before we were allowed to wake them at “9am.” (Aside: no wonder those Christmas mornings felt torturously long as we played cards in my sister’s room and anxiously watched the clock.)
Evidently some people skirt the issue by hiding plastic eggs instead, but then why do they color all of those hard boiled eggs? In a plastic egg family, what does one do with all those hard boiled eggs? Is the journey the destination, whereby the activity is simply to color them, and then into the refrigerator they go until they’re relegated to your dad’s breakfast for the next 7 consecutive days? If so, it seems an awfully anti-climactic end given the emphasis and tradition around the coloring event itself.
Suffice it to say, I am perennially stumped and will sadly be setting my alarm for 4:30am tomorrow in hopes that I can hide the hard boiled eggs and catch another hour of sleep before A bursts in, loudly asking to watch his recent favorite series, Helper Cars.
I went to dinner tonight with a group of colleagues. One of them asked me about the boys, and I filled them in on the latest highlights… many of them featuring A’s hijinks, of course. Another one somberly shook her head and remarked, “I honestly don’t remember how I did it with little kids at home. It’s so hard; it’s like I’ve entirely repressed it.” She almost immediately then tried to apologize for the seriousness cast over this – ahem – energy-intensive chapter of life, but I told her I actually found her observation comforting. It’s not in my head: it is objectively difficult.
The past few months since I went back to work, I’ve joked that Dave & I only have time for fun once per week. The rest of our time is committed almost entirely to simply keeping the wheels on the train at home. Take, for instance, Sundays, and our standard must-dos:
- – Baths x 4 (45 min)
- – Nail trims x 80 (10 min)
- – Pack for daycare x 3: clean sheets, refresh spare clothes &/or outdoor play gear, & diaper supplies (1 hr)
- – Pack J’s school: lunch + library book + sign reading log (15 min)
- – Pack C’s bottles for next day + solid foods for the week (30 min)
- – Grocery run and meal prep for the week (incl making baby purees for solids above – see below) (1.5 – 3.5 hrs)
- – Family laundry (2 – 4 full cycles… as in, the manufacturer of our washer would not advise that volume of clothes in a cycle)
- – Work outs (1 hr/each of us ideally)
- – And then of course: 3 x square meals x 6 x people with varying dietary needs, many x diaper changes, so much x discipline, too many x reminders, and general parental engagement
This past Sunday, we also added time spent:
- – Giving O a haircut (40 min – DIY by me while the boys are young and not discerning)
- – Wrestling O 4x/day to let us give him his eye drop for his pink eye (should take 2 min but instead takes 5 – 10 each time, followed by anguished wailing for another 5 – 10 immediately afterward)
- – Taking 2/4 boys to a friend’s birthday party (3 hrs)
- – Sending updates on Teacher Appreciation Week at our daycare (I run the planning committee but have officially reached my resource limit and regret signing up again) (1 hr)
- – On the phone with UPS trying to track down my breast milk that was shipped “overnight” (3 days prior) and never arrived after a business trip last week (30 min on the call & 5 years off my life)
Don’t get me wrong: time spent with these adorable little people is deeply, soulfully fulfilling. But then I look at the e-communication between me and Dave after the course of the day and think… if there was a way to spend more of the time doing things that enrich us as parent & child simultaneously, and less time just surviving the day, that would be okay with me, too.
Is there anything more delightful to purchase than bedding for little kids? Between the many crib sheets, bed sheets, and — recently — a new set of bunk beds, I have derived so much joy from these purchases over the years.
In fact, I was so compelled to wring every ounce of happiness from this stage of life where the boys have such sweet interests (and such little insistence on making these selections themselves), that I ended up with 4 different prints for the new bunks: dinosaurs, vehicles, construction, and animals.
I also choose to believe that even as they age and grow, and their interests mature, and their long limbs sprawl across these prints, and they manage to sleep past 6am in these very beds… they will surely still appreciate these sheets as much as I do. If I’m wrong, don’t tell me.
Our bedtime routine for the older 2 boys consists of a few books, a few songs, and sometimes a story. I started the storytelling portion a couple of years ago as inspired by my uncle, who told epic tales about my siblings, me, and my cousins — and I do mean “epic” as I only found out later that he lifted a lot of his material from classics like the Odyssey or Iliad. The trick to storytelling is that they have to close their eyes to imagine the story, peppered with all the references that allude to their interests du jour. Before you know it, they’re sleeping soundly.
But as the boys have gotten older and a bit bossier with their requests for story content (“make the bad guy a giant!” “say that we’re traveling up a volcano this time!” “pretend that C has super strength and can defeat the monster in one punch!”), Dave has started to troll them a little bit during his nights putting them to bed.
Take, for instance, J’s fascination with dragons for the past few months. He requested stories about the brothers as dragons, and we obliged. But then he started requesting that his dragon self had multiple powers: fire and water. Or fire and water and ice. And eventually, without shame, he asked that Dave tell the story with J featured as an Everything Dragon. As in, everything power. As in, totally OP* and does not make for much of a contested battle scene at the story’s climax.
So Dave obliged and started telling stories about J as an Everything Dragon. But in the stories, the attack scenes were riddled with mentions of poppy seeds flying, or sesame seeds scattering around, or J getting soggy and crumbly from the rain. The big reveal finally happened: J was actually an Everything *Bagel* Dragon.
This happened subtly at first, but then in enough stories that eventually I could hear J explicitly request during story time: “Dad, can you tell me a story where I’m an everything dragon? But not the bagel kind.”
In the 90 – 120 minute saga that is bedtime in our house, I have to say, me loitering in the hall to eavesdrop on the hilarity of Dave trolling the boys with these types of things is probably not the material that would get us featured on Parents magazine, but it is definitely how I just spent my Friday night.
*overpowered/gamer-speak
