LEAVING THE HOUSE
The first step to leaving the house is getting yourself ready, which has been a piece of cake since you were old enough to tie your own shoes. With more kids, you just add more steps--step one for you to get ready, step two a child, step three another child, and so on. Simple.
Now cue the fights when the child doesn’t want that shirt, or those pants, or those shoes. There’s the younger child who does want to wear shoes, but can’t put them on by herself; and then there’s the oldest child, who CAN put them on, but now doesn’t want to. And then there’s the baby, all giggly and drooly in the carseat in the front room, spitting up or pooping quite happily right after you buckled him in. Or maybe it’s the middle child who smells suspicious as you open the door.
Or maybe it’s both. It happens.
Eventually you get to the step that involves the diaper bag and everything you can’t forget: two sets of diapers, diaper cream, two sets of back-up clothes, wipes, changing pad, a pacifier, snacks, drinks, nursing cover, burp rag, cell phone, wallet, sanity (I often forget this one).
Then we reach what I consider my nemesis. . .nemeses?. . .the carseats. You wrestle all the straps and snaps and buckles and you win, eventually.
By the time you reach your destination, you’re wondering why you’re not in Jamaica for a four-day vacation, because you certainly spent enough time and effort to get you there.
But no, it’s only Wal-Mart.
POOP
Right from day one, you’re immersed in a new world of poop. You clean the last bout of sticky tar-like poop off your baby’s little bum. You keep track of dirty diapers to make sure your baby’s healthy. In the days that follow, poop will cover blankets, your clothes, your couch. It will fill baby’s diaper and beyond. It’ll turn baby’s back or tummy orange.
As your child grows, your new worst nightmare is your child squirming and rolling during a diaper change, threatening to land that poopy bum on anything but the changing pad.
Your schedule revolves around their poop. Smell a little something at family dinner? Time for a change! Got your toddler all set with clothes changed, shoes on, and heading out the door? Their favorite time to poop! Missed a call on your phone or at the door while you were cleaning up the yuck? It’s nothing personal. Want to go swimming but your little one hasn’t taken care of their daily business yet? Might want to wait on that.
It just gets better when more pooping bums come along. On some mornings they all go at the same time, so by the time I’m done with it all, I can barely walk down the hallway without keeling over.
Then there’s potty training. . . . . . . . . .that’s all I’m gonna say.
Oh, and diarrhea. You want to torture someone, you make them clean up a kid’s bum when they got the runs.
And part of pooping is tooting. With each young child comes a new toot machine set on full autopilot. Beware those bums.
BODILY FLUIDS
Then there’s the lovelier mess of bodily fluids. Before I had kids, dealing with snot and vomit was disgusting. Now after having kids. . .it’s still disgusting.
I would vote vomit as the worst. My husband is the primary cleaner of such messes--especially when I’m pregnant and can’t even enter the room--and I probably owe him my soul for that.
Then there’s the yellow fluids that come from down below. It’s not so bad to deal with until the child is potty training and it gets. . .everywhere. It’s the hardest to clean when it’s on furniture and carpet. After a while you almost start to miss when it was contained in a diaper. Almost.
Spit-up is one of those baby fluids that everyone says you just get used to. It’s gooey and smelly and inconvenient, but they are right: you do.
Where runny noses are concerned, I’ve gotten a lot of exercise chasing my kids around the house with a tissue, praying I can wipe the snot before their hands do. Three-year-olds are decent at grabbing tissues before disaster strikes. But in two and unders, since you can’t quarantine them in their room all day, your couches are gonna get it. First the snotty child runs and faceplants on the cushions as she pulls herself up. Then her nose will itch and she’s got this perfect couch at face level, so why not.
But since having kids, wiping runny noses is as routine as brushing hair out of my face. Ya just roll with it. Which leads me to. . .
SICKNESS
I once thought there was no way my kids could be contagious if they’d had a runny nose for weeks and weeks. I mean seriously, transferable sickness can’t last that long, right? But after observing my snotty kids interacting with others, and other snotty kids interacting with mine, I’ve learned the truth: THEY’RE ALL CONTAGIOUS. ALL THE TIME. They’re contagious with the Runny Nose Virus (RNV).
This virus usually doesn’t affect their moods. Maybe they’ll have one lethargic day, or one or two hard nights of poor sleeping. But it’s enough to keep you confined to your sickness-riddled house. There is no going to the park, (especially indoor play-places), or the library, church, that exercise gym with the daycare, or friends’ houses. For our family, the only outlet is going to our parents’ houses, where we cross our fingers and hope that good adult hygiene will protect parents from RNV.
Beyond RNV, our kids will only throw up or have a fever once or twice a year, if they’re lucky. On occasion those runny noses morph into infections. Then there’s the issue of us the parents getting sick. Remember those sick days when all you did was sleep in your bed, or lie on the couch watching TV shows with a box of tissues by your side? Yeah, those days are out--or at least come much less often.
SAFETY
Safety takes on a whole new meaning once you start caring for fragile little humans who will crawl right off a bed because they don’t know that gravity is a thing.
To protect these little ones, parents must develop a degree of paranoia. The potential threats are everywhere, and having developed safety awareness long ago, it can be hard for parents to nail down every risk to a child. Just think of the heart-stopping trouble a child can cause once they learn to open doors. There’s the first day your child hears the garage door opening and goes “Daddy!” just like normal, but then you hear the door to the garage open--and it takes approximately 2.67 seconds to imagine the child running into the garage as the car pulls in, and terror strikes.
But just a day prior, you never would have pictured such a threat because the child had never opened the door to the garage before.
The best age for triggering heart attacks is when the child starts walking and climbing. Children develop mobility far faster than common sense, which isn’t all that fair to their caretakers. One second, you’re showing her the way to the slide on the playground; the next, she’s tumbling off the playground because she tried to climb down the ladder like you did, and very much couldn’t do it, but it never occurred to you that she’d even try.
There are things children can fall off of, and things that can fall on them.
There are electrical sockets and things that should not be ingested.
There are hot things and sharp things.
There is lots of water. Sometimes.
There are cars outside.
Personally, just writing about this triggers my paranoia and anxiety. It’s daunting to think of how much brainpower goes towards protecting young ones. And not just brainpower either, but also emotional power. I apologize now to anyone who may have endured my over-reaction to something small that happened to my child--I’m still learning to control my mama bear. But if I happen to be pregnant when such a thing happens, you might want to run.
This part of parenting is not fun. But I pray every day, and I observe that the human race hasn’t died out because of dangers befalling children, and my heart goes out to those who have experienced the greatest of losses to ever be felt by a parent.
“Making the decision to have a child -- it's momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body.” -Elizabeth Stone
Protecting our children becomes a part of us, from day one. I can’t blame any parent for being overprotective, and the level at which parents take a step back as their children grow older will be different for all of us.
YOURSELF
Children are not adults. (Just in case you were wondering.) Therefore, they don’t see things the way our adult brains, and all the adult brains around us, see things. That includes us.
Children don’t judge, for one thing. They don’t see flaws or societal expectations. They won’t constantly tell you that you need to have this, or be this, or do this, in order to be happy. They don’t need our perfection--just our love and best efforts.
You may see a reflection of yourself in your young child. You’ll see the way you respond to things, like when you’re mad; or really happy; or some other habit or quirk that your child picked up. It’s bizarre to see because we’re not used to it--adults just don’t go around mimicking each other. (Weird, I know.) No one can show you how you react to certain things better than your child can. It’s a unique way to evaluate your own behaviors.
Children are little bundles of innocence and forgiveness and love, and to have their love is one of the purest forms of joy.
