Doodaddy

Boo fell in love again yesterday. Not to worry: it happens all the time.

Happy about the swing or the company?

It was the first summer meeting of Boo’s kiddie-acrobatics class and W–, the new boy, was a bit teary. Boo and W– didn’t exchange two words during class, though afterward she and I both knuckle-knocked him in a show of support. (That’s how we roll out here in ‘Frisco. Leftist fist bumps are de rigeur.) That was the extent of their relationship.

That night, though, she would not stop talking about him.

“W– was crying today. It was his first day as a Tootsie Roller.”

I’d cry if I were called a “Tootsie Roller,” too, but in this case it means that he’s reached the age group where mom and dad watch from the sidelines instead of joining in: The toddler-acrobat rite of passage.

“W– was wearing a striped shirt today. And I have a striped shirt, too!”

On and on like that, and of course she planned some future dates.

“I’m going to see W– again next week. And I’ll see B–, too!”

Oops, change of subject! B– is another boy, almost five, whom we only know because he was visiting a neighbor last week. Again, Boo and B– didn’t even play together but nevertheless, she’s obsessed:

“I’m bigger than B—.”
“B— has a baby sister.”
“B— doesn’t have curly hair like M—.”

M— is a boy who graduated from Boo’s school; they met about twice. On and on this goes: Boo talks constantly about boys she hardly knows, and rarely about friends of either gender she actually loves.

I suspect the universe of giving us a taste of what we can expect from middle school — “But dad, he doesn’t even know I’m aliiiive!” Forewarned, I can now come up with a more sensitive response than “Yeah, you’re probably right.”

“Paranoid Daddy” should have been in contention for my blog title: I spend an inordinate amount of time worrying about what my parenting would look like if someone just happened to walk in at any moment.

I’m not talking housework, here: I figure a little chaos is reasonable for a two-kid household. No, I actually arrange the little remnants of Boo’s passage to make it look like she’s been eating balanced meals. To wit:

A lunch of strawberries, a bit of sausage, boiled egg, and milk, right? Not too bad!

Except that Boo ate one bite of sausage and licked a strawberry before she switched over to her preferred meal: napkin ring soup.

That’s when the “WHAT IF SOMEONE WALKS IN?” horror set in – my very own little neurosis! I tore up the egg to look eaten and skewered the licked strawberry to sustain the myth that Boo would be right back to take care of it.

Of course, she ate nothing else.

I think my fear that someone will question my parenting choices drives me more than any inherent desire to be a good dad.

Fortunately, absolutely no one pays me that much attention.

Well, it took a week of nursery school, but Boo finally asked me about my sex life in front of all the other parents.

Solo free climb up Mount Lots-of-Rocks

We were sitting in the schoolyard at pickup time, surrounded by a frothy mass of child and parent and stroller. As I witlessly pursued the usual post-school inquiries that kids universally loathe ("Did you do art? Really? You did?"), Boo interrupted with a question of her own.

"Daddy, when you and mommy are taking a shower at the same time…" 

Oh, hell, I think. Furtively glancing around to see if anyone is paying attention, I plan my chuckling response of "Oh, we have two showers in the house, hee, hee, aren’t kids a riot!"

I’m also inwardly marveling at how early Boo has started to ask these serious "Questions About Life" that we all dread.  She’s supposed to ask about treats or where she can find a really, really tiny baby shirt to wear. But then she’s all "Are the animals at the museum real or dead?" She’s not supposed to ask about life. Not yet, right?

Well, onward. "If you and mommy are taking a shower at the same time, I could take care of myself in my room, right?"

Aha. This isn’t going where I’d thought. Boo had taken care of herself and her baby sister that very morning for a good twenty minutes while I shaved and showered, so I said, "Well, sure! You’re good at taking care of yourself."

Follow-up number one: "How about if mommy is at work and you are inside, I could be by myself in the backyard, right?"

I feel like a spy: I’m learning indirectly about what the kids’ conversations amongst themselves through the questions Boo is asking. Clearly, Boo’s been having the "How independent are you?" chat with her new friends. Fair enough: I’m game for some virtual eavesdropping.

"Sure, but I’d check on you a lot, because I can see you from the kitchen windows."

A few moments of processing and then Boo delivers the coup de grâce. "So if you and mommy and Claudia go to London, can I stay here and take care of Carson?" (Carson is the cat.)

This escalation is surprising because Boo’s been talking incessantly about going to London herself — to meet Mary Poppins, natch. I’m a little taken aback that she’d be willing to miss the trip.

Anyway, I’d been doing too much explaining that day so I asked her what she thought about it.

"Maybe if Uncle K– and Aunt J– [who live in town] came over sometimes for dinner," she began. "And A– [the neighbor teenager and potential babysitter] could play with me." These weren’t improvised responses: she’d been thinking this out. Five days in preschool and the girl’s already individuating. Sheesh.

I totally get where it’s coming from: for her first three years Boo has had a designated adult “in charge” at all times; at school, it’s more a group thing. The twenty-ish kids go from station to station, inside and out, being minded variously by four teachers. We’ve always played a man-to-man defense and suddenly she’s facing a zone. (Sorry if I’m embarrassing myself by the sports metaphor: I’m hopeless at that stuff.) This is a level of freedom new to Boo: she gets to choose her own grownup, or can even avoid them entirely for a while. And for a kid who is already pretty independent — well, let’s just say that I suspect she’s already planning to get her own apartment next fall.

Fortunately, the key to answering unreasonable children’s requests is the ambiguous future tense. My reply runs roughly like this, inner voice highlighted: “Not now, but someday [when you’re 16] you’ll be able to stay by yourself for a while [45 minutes, tops] and take care of Carson [don’t turn off your phone, though].”

She seems satisfied with that answer; at any rate, she quickly changes the subject to something equally alluring, like the prospect of nicking some more Scooby snacks.

One more step: my little girl is getting so frikkin’ big.

It’s after midnight and I’m wiping down the dining room table for the third time today. At three, Boo has mastered the skills necessary for fine dining but remains less interested in demonstrating said table manners than in performing creative food experiments.

Boo pretends she’s laundry to get my attention.

Tonight, I find that she’s somehow julienned a cucumber slice into a strong glue, adhering remnants of cheese and crumb to the table, the seat and legs of the chair, and the rug. The virtues of the eat-in kitchen (which we don’t have) over the dining room (which we do) have never been more clear.

All this time, I’m trying to calm my inner chore voice. It’s not a proper voice so much as an alarm system: when I perceive an undone task I feel an involuntary ping! against my skull, a little like I imagine dogs must feel who’ve been fitted with those horrible bark-discouraging electroshock collars.

•    That tree on the patio needs to be repotted or else binned. Zap!
•    The garbage is starting to smell vaguely reptilian. Oooof!
•    Hello Kitty ice pack, infant ball, three pairs shoes, tray from high chair – just a random sample of what remains strewn about the floor. Pow! Ker-plop! Flrbbbb!

Conventional wisdom dictates that I should let the chores go undone and pay attention to my kids, my family. “Don’t sweat the small stuff!” trumpet the parenting magazines, written I’m sure by people who don’t have kids under 5 at home any more. I suspect that forgetting one’s days as parent to an infant and young kid is a natural human defense mechanism against insanity.

Besides, it doesn’t work. The small stuff becomes the big stuff if you let it pile up too long. You tell me that now is the time to play with my kids — well, now’s also the time to decide what kind of environment I want them growing up in and try, and mostly fail, to engineer that environment.

So it’s back to the chore board. But I can’t help wishing that an art-organizing, puzzle-piece collecting, food-residue scrubbing elf would suddenly appear.

Or maybe, I think as I wipe toothpaste-and-spittle spray off the bathroom mirror, just maybe he has.

Dear Boobaby,

Images of Month XL

We mostly use Roman numerals for these letters; that makes you XL months old. Extra large, indeed: every day you seem taller and bigger, more solid little girl than any kind of baby. You’re more lucid and funny and stubborn and just plain more grown up than ever. Even the baby clothes you insist on wearing every few days are getting larger — you squeeze into the 18-month clothes instead of raiding Claudia’s newborn outfits.

Monsters have become rather an obsession for you. The giants of preschool literature — Sesame Street and Frances — make monsters seem fun and lovable, and so you’re totally unclear about why anyone would be scared of them. Scooby Doo is your special bedtime treat, which explains that whenever we play "monsters" you finish up by pulling off your mask and saying "Guess who I really am?" (It’s usually the creepy caretaker from the first scene. Who knew?)

As before, you have some pretty testy moments, and they’re still nearly always down to a lack of food. The very idea of sitting through an entire meal when it’s so much more fun to imagine a napkin ring into life as a guy named Diver Dave who just has to sing one more song before taking a bite — well, you get the picture. The conventional wisdom is that we should simply make food available at mealtimes and figure you’ll eat it when you’re hungry. That’s great, but any subsequent physical exertion turns you into a starving, seething wreck if we try that, so we have reverted to a little mild cajoling.

So, now, what else happened this month. Oh, right: you started school.

You started SCHOOL!

Your first day, you were a little tentative, probably because we made the logistical error of taking you in at the same moment that every other kid arrived. You were bombarded with well-meaning but overwhelming suggestions of what to do next. At the beginning, you would have been pretty happy just poking through the dollhouse, but one parent would come over and say, "Here, try this!" and another would say, "No, play with my kid!" and on and on until your eyes were spinning. Once the hordes departed, though, you were more or less happy for a couple of hours.

Day two, though, you met a boy who shares your love of Scooby Doo and fast cars. And then a couple of girls who love to bake. And then there were fish to paint and octopuses to stich up and stories to hear, and you sent daddy off for coffee for two hours without even a second look.

So all told, it took you about an hour to warm up to school. It’s taking your parents a lot longer to get used to it. We love watching your successes, of course, but all the same it’s a little jarring that a whole gaggle of new people are getting to know you, and at first, they don’t know you that well.

Your teacher asks if you need the potty a couple of times a day. You’ve never had trouble with functions: if you need to go, you say so, and if not, you say you don’t. Since you didn’t use the potty for three hours, teacher seems to worry that you’re rejecting the bathroom completely, which, to be fair, is probably a reasonable fear for a preschool teacher. But that’s just not you: you go when you need to, and you have for over a year. It’s a minor thing to be sure, but it’s the beginning of many years of interactions with teachers who will misunderstand you in ways large and small, and we need to accept that as part of your enlarging world.

And that’s it, isn’t it? For the first time, you’ll have direct relationships, unmediated by us, with someone other than your family and a close circle of friends. You’ll come home some day soon and tell us all about Susie or Danny or Wilhelmina — and we, your parents, won’t have been the ones who introduced you. Which is exactly how it’s supposed to work, of course, but you’ll forgive us, I hope, for coming along slowly.

Not you, of course: you’re still charging forward with all your imaginary and real friends (and crimefighting Great Danes).

We love you very, very much,

Working Mom & Doodaddy