Lessons I Came To Late

One of the things I am most envious of regarding natural parents is that they have the chance to ramp up. Yes, the newborn thing is dumped on you all at once, which is remarkably unfair, as it is the most difficult stage of parenting. Until you get to the toddler stage. Until you get to the teenager stage. Anyway, my point is that natural parents get the chance to grow along with, and ahead of, their children.

And plan defense.

I read a decent step-parenting book on the plane on the way back from LA with the kids. But it left some stuff out, some lessons that it would have been helpful to know ahead of time. Here are a few:

1) Everything moves.

Unless I keep everything I may ever possibly need in my room and protect the entrance with an unbreakable curse, I will spend time looking for things. Every object that I need will be picked up by a child or teenager and moved to a different place. No reason necessary.

Here are some I never anticipated:

-Bracelets in the freezer.

-Car keys neatly put away in the back of the drawer with the DVD’s.

-Credit cards put away in board games.

-All of my socks in #4’s bed.

– My yoga pants wadded up in the sleeve of #5’s only suit (which doesn’t fit him anymore).

The rule also applies to their own stuff. My mantra some days is “I don’t know, it’s not my day to watch it,” which has helped teach a bit of self-responsibility. It has also led me to purchase several pairs of shoes because one or both of the pair I already bought have gone missing.

2) Clutter is a constant (k).

Hooke’s law of elasticity, which uses the k constant, basically states that strain is directly proportional to stress. Duh. No matter how much headway I make towards organization, the amount of clutter remains the same, although it may change forms and locations.

-If I make any progress on the paperwork pile, someone cleans out their backpack or their desk at school and brings an equal amount of paperwork home.

-If I manage to collect a couple bags of clothing and household donations, someone (ahem, #4) goes to a yard sale or, god forbid “trash pickin’ ” and returns with highly useful items such as broken ski poles, ceramic teddy bears decorated with plastic flowers, and pieces of MDF shelving (but never the entire shelving unit).

-If I get the common areas of the house neat, the overflow all ends up in my bedroom. The kids then see me as a hypocrite for telling them to clean their rooms when my own room is such a disaster.

-Kids clean their rooms by pushing everything under the bed or into the closet (actually, I should have remembered this one from the time I served as a child myself).

3) Kids lie.

When they’re still kind of little and cute, you mistakenly believe that they don’t know how to lie yet. When you catch them in a harmless fib, you blame one of their older siblings for teaching them how to do it. What you don’t realize is that the only circumstances in which they won’t lie is when it will make you feel better; they won’t lie about the dinner you cooked, the shirt you bought them, or whether your ass looks fat in these pants (not that you were talking to them in the first place, mister).

Other than when it comes time to spare your feelings, pretty much everything they say is an outright lie or else slanted towards getting what they want. Speaking of slants. . .

4) The cost of raising a child as reported in the New York Times is $222, 360.

This is bullshit.

The cost of raising a child from birth to age eighteen is: all of your money, plus 20%, plus whatever APR you were able to arrange for that 20%.

5) It can always get louder.

Now you know. If anyone has any other lessons you want to let me in on, I’m all ears.

Egg Hunt. Work it.

Yesterday the egg hunt was left to me. We gave up all pretense of the Easter Bunny doing it after that first year. So I locked the kids in the basement while I hid the eggs. I was given a walkie talkie with which to communicate, but it had neither a belt clip nor a fist mic and so I left it in the kitchen. I occasionally heard squawks coming out of it and I’m sure they wondered if I was ever going to let them out.

You must understand that they dyed thirty-three eggs.

This happened while CC and I were at work. Also, when I envision the kids covering the dining room table to protect it while doing an art project, I see cardboard. I see newspaper.

I never would have thought of wrapping paper. Ingenious. Wrapping paper that is eight dollars a roll plus shipping because I order it online a couple times a year in futile hope that there will always be wrapping paper for the nine billion birthdays we celebrate. The stuff that is stored right next to the plain brown, inexpensive craft paper. Neat.

In addition to thirty-three real eggs, I had twelve plastic ones, filled with various things. Forty-five eggs, that is, and I don’t even need #5 to help me with that.

I made it hard. We don’t really have a yard. We have a steeply raked (think: three stories high) and tiered mud and rock bank with 192,000 plantings put in by the crazy gardening woman who lived here before us.

I like how kids think parents won’t ever exert themselves. We exert ourselves constantly, what with the pretending to cook and running around and pretending to clean and buying things and also the working part. We parents are fully capable of exertion. A kid bases their concept of a parent not wanting to exert any effort because the kid comes to the parent at 9:30pm, on the parent’s only night off, when said parent is right in the middle of story time with a younger sibling and is tired from running around all day and in fact has already changed into comfy but cute yoga pants or maybe more correctly never got properly dressed that day and is thinking only of trying to get all these kids to bed to spend some quality time with the other parent if you know what I mean, and the kid says that they need posterboard for a very important project that is due tomorrow, so not only will the parent have to go out and buy the posterboard but the kid will need help with the project and also permission to stay up way past their bed time, and the parent swears, not exactly at them but definitely in front of them.

Children are incapable of understanding fine distinctions like this.

I exerted myself for the egg hunt. What better cause to spend effort on than your own personal amusement at the expense of your kids?

I pulled on my boots and hid those eggs on all three stories’ worth of that steeply raked mud and rock bank. I camouflaged them under the piles of leaves that I never raked up last fall, tucked them in among the crazy gardening lady’s 192,000 plantings, put them behind trees and inside separated bits of the retaining wall.

Of the plastic eggs, I issued this decree: One has a five dollar bill in it. One contains dog poop.

Oh, and we’ve had a lot of rain. And it was like eighty degrees yesterday.

There was an awful lot of complaining about how much work the egg hunt was.

The five-dollar bill one I hid in the recycling bin. #3 actually paused in front of the trash and recycling bins, looked back at me, and decided that it was too icky and I wouldn’t have wanted to touch that.

She forgets how many times I have cleaned up her vomit.

So everyone was pissed when #5, being fearless, dove headfirst into the recycling bin and retrieved a pink plastic egg that did, in fact, turn out to have a five dollar bill in it.

#2 was the one who found the very last plastic egg. They were all so convinced that I had spoken the truth regarding a dog poop egg that she opened it gingerly at arm’s length and the candy it contained exploded out all over the ground. Proving that despite all evidence to the contrary, they do still, at times, listen to me.

I win.

Earth Day Our Way, or Carbon Footprint: We Has It.

Yeah, I know this is a day late for Earth Day. I was hoping my kids would do something heartwarming to celebrate Earth Day that I could report, some new way of showing concern for the environment, an Earth Awareness that would put me to shame, or hell, even something funny. They completely failed me though, thereby failing you, and the entire planet.

The only kid that did any observation of Earth Day was #3, who wore the Earth Day shirt she made at school last year. Being that she made it when she was twelve, and now she’s thirteen and a half, let’s just say she’s very impressed with. . . how differently it fits her this year. She wore the shirt while dutifully carrying out her chore of the day, which was cleaning all the bins and shelves from the refrigerator. With bleach.

I’m pretty sure all the other kids were chucking alkaline batteries down storm drains and melting water bottles with Zippo lighters.

My kids are obsessed with water bottles. The plastic, disposable, bad-for-the-entire-universe-not-just-our-planet kind. What can I say? Marketing works (hello, Aquapod people? Bite me). But there comes a time when even I can’t ignore something anymore, in this case the mind-boggling quantity of plastic bottles we were going through on a daily basis. Yes, we recycle them, but in New Jersey (a.k.a. The Soprano State), that doesn’t necessarily mean that they don’t end up in the same landfill as the trash. So a while back I spent a small fortune on stainless steel, eco-friendly water bottles. Everyone got their own in their favorite color. I got some extras. These were Their Water Bottles Forever. No more plastic.

They hated them. They fought me every step of the way. They would “forget” them, in school, in their lockers, in someone else’s car, under the bed, whatever. And hit me up for money for a bottle of water.

I actually suggested to #2 one day that she take a cup with her and fill it up at the water fountain at school since she didn’t know where her water bottle was. She went back upstairs and got her allowance money instead, and has had the decency not to remind me what an ass I am ever since. At least about that.

Over time, their feelings about reusable water bottles changed. Various incarnations are showing up now at the Dollar Store (and the Five Dollar Store– does anyone else have that? It’s new). They like the ones with the crazy designs on them.

The ones, which, when you put them in the dishwasher, start peeling paint. Rather than releasing BPA particles into the environment, they release little bits of toxic paint onto your lips, into your water. Awesome.

Don’t tell me they’re not supposed to go in the dishwasher. That’s the only chance in hell I have of killing the vomit bug that is always going around. Always. #4 is laying on the couch with a bucket as we speak.

Meanwhile, the four large, plain old stainless steel ones with no paint at all on them that I bought for CC and I? Have no idea what they did with those. I wouldn’t be surprised if #2 has them tucked away in a secret place and laughs maniacally every time I’m slamming around the kitchen because I can’t find a water bottle. That’s what I would do if I were her.

Happy Frickin’ Earth Day.