Just Say No

I thought I had at least a decade or so before I had to have the “Just say No” conversation with my son. Kids grow up fast these days.

I’m talking about water balloons here.

I clock a lot of hours at the playground and through my recent time there, I have come to realize there are two kinds of people in the world: those who like to burst water balloons and those who like to keep water balloons intact.

Primo, as you might imagine, belongs to the later group.

He’s definitely not in the majority there. Most of the other 4 year-old boys love nothing more than to hurl full-to-bursting colored vessels of water at each other’s heads. Frankly, I don’t blame them. It looks like fun. If you paid me a quarter, I’d do it too. But my sensitive little boy simply likes to fill the balloons and then carry them around for a while, feeling their weight, appreciating the coolness, watching the bubbles, just generally loving on the balloon.

But yesterday, Primo ran into one of his school friends at the playground, Mark. Mark is a little older than Primo and a real rough-and-tumble, Stars-Wars-loving, prone-to-wrestle kind of boy. This is not a kid that cuddles with water balloons. Primo is always interested in him but a little frightened too, because he’s not one to toes the line, and that freaks my son out.

Since it’s a slow day in the playground when they run into each other, they are both totally delighted and pal up right away, running with abandon through the sprinklers. Then Primo comes sprinting up to me and says, breathlessly, “Mark is so excited we have water balloons! Can he have some! Can we fill them up!”

“Of course!” I say, happy to see my boy having such a lark of a time. I distribute a modest number of water

balloons to Primo, Mark and Seconda, too, despite the fact that she likes to eat them and they are, like, number 1 on the choking hazard list.

As soon as Mark has his, he shouts: “Let’s throw them at each other!!!!”

And then Primo looks worried. And I’m thinking, “Come on, Prim, don’t tell me you didn’t peg him as a burster right from the get-go, now.” But I do have twenty-seven more years of experience than my son so I guess I have that advantage when it comes to reading people, In any event, Primo is trying really hard to be game, so he shouts back, “O-K!” but there’s a waver in his voice that puts me on alert.

The boys fill up a few water balloons and throw them at each other and Mark is having the time of his life while Primo looks like he’s in the waiting room of the doctor’s office.

So I hand out a yellow and a green balloon and I warn, “This is the last of the balloons, guys.”

Mark fills his balloon up first and throws it before Primo can even get his filled. He’s got an insatiable appetite for explosives, that one. And as soon as Primo has his balloon filled, Mark is chanting, “Throw it! Throw it!”

The look on my son’s face is now one of total, undisguised panic. He does not want to throw his last balloon. I know this. I tell him, “You don’t have to throw it, honey, you can keep it.”

Suddenly its like I’m at the initiation for Alpha Phi Alpha and I’m watching a sophomore pushing a freshman to do another keg-stand, when he knows he just can’t handle it. “Throw it! Come on! Do it do it do it do it!’

And then, regretting it even as his hand lets go, Primo throws the balloon.

:

At that moment, Seconda races at top speed out of the playground and I have to run at a breakneck speed to overtake her before she gets to the street. When we finally get back to where we’ve left Primo, he is no longer there. Instead I find him standing in the far corner of the playground, alone. His mouth hangs open and he is sobbing in huge terrific choking gasps.

“I didn’t want to do it!” he bawls, “I didn’t want to break the balloon and I felt that I MUST! And now it’s too laaaaaaate!”

No one tells you that being a mother will involve having your heart broken just about every day. Or maybe it’s just that I’m a wreck and not fit for the slings and arrows of day-to-day childhood foibles. I just felt so bad for my boy, as he cried: “He just kept telling me to do it and I felt that I must but I just didn’t want to!”

A resourceful mother knows to always keep a balloon or two in reserve, for precisely these emergencies. So I hand one over to Primo, we fill it up together and he carries it carefully all the way home, where we put it in a cup and it still rests. It’s a symbol for something but I don’t know what.

It’s not Mark’s fault, of course. When we left the playground, he was blissfully swinging and waved an enthusiastic “Goodbye!” to Primo, who was still sniffling from the heartbreak of the broken balloon. Primo was confused at how Mark could be so blithely unaware of the devastation he caused but I explained that he didn’t do it on purpose, that Mark probably couldn’t understand why on EARTH someone would fill a balloon with water if not to make an enormous, icy splash with it.

“Honey, you don’t have to do something just because someone tells you to,” I told my son as we left the playground, “It doesn’t matter how many times they tell you to do it or if they yell and shout you can always say,

“Thanks but no thanks, I don’t want to!”

And then we rehearsed – he being Mark and me being him, saying, “No” and then, “I said, No!” and then,

”Buddy, if you don’t back off, I’m not playing with you.”

It’s what they call a teachable moment. What else are you gonna do, right?

Strawberry Stoop Stand

My son hates strawberries. No, wait, that’s an understatement. He reviles them. In fact, he will actually gag when he sees a strawberry or similar kind of squishy fruit – he can’t even stand to have someone eating them at the same table as him.

I usually try to respect his strange yet undeniable strawberry aversion. But this past weekend, I decided to put him on an accelerated GUTI (get used to it) track and bring him strawberry picking.

This would be roughly equivalent to dropping someone with a rodent phobia into a rat-infested gutter. I’m not a monster. I am just a little exhausted of catering to his many phobias and aversions. I thought it could even potentially be fun.

We got off to a rocky start.

The strawberry farm, being a farm, was muddy. Primo hates mud.

“My shoes are getting all DIRTY!!!!!” he shouted, “I want to go HOME!”

“Just walk on the grassy parts,” I chirped merrily, “you’ll be fine.”

Then he stepped on something . . . something red and warm and squishy. It burst under his muddy shoe.

“IT’S A STRAWBERRY!!!!!” he screamed -- shocked, chagrined, betrayed, “WHY DID YOU BRING ME HERE!”

We wiped his shoes clean, we urged him to be calm and reassured him he didn’t have to pick any berries at all. But still our little pastoral romp in the strawberry field looked ill-fated.

“I hate strawberries,” Primo whined, “I wish they were never invented!”

And then, as it always happens, just as if someone flipped a switch in his mind, he got on board.

“I’ll stand on the side and be a spotter,” he conceded.

So Primo pointed out the good berries while David and I picked and Seconda ate rancid ones off the ground despite our protestations., When she tired of that, she lay flat down on her stomach atop the smashed berries and mud and basked in the sun. Little by little, Primo inched closer to the strawberry plants, in his effort to point out where the very ripest, very reddest berries were. And by the end of our little jaunt, he was even tugging them off the stem themselves. Phobia crushed. Victory is sweet. David and I are parents of the year!!!!

Of course Primo still wasn’t going to eat the repugnant fruit. And there is a limit to how many berries Sec and I can consume, so when we got back to Brooklyn, Primo, entrepreneur extraordinaire, suggested having a strawberry sale.

“Genius idea!” I said.

He made a sign, distinguishing his product from all the other stoop strawberries with a little embellishment (the dance is a figurative one, a kind of flavor explosion).

Then we headed down to the stoop.

Primo, it was soon clear, was a proponent of the hard sell.

“Straaaaaaawberries!” he shouted, “Red ripe straaaaawberries! Hand picked by meeeeeeee!”

When he saw someone passing by our stoop, he would direct this announcement at them, yelling it over and over again so that it was more assaultive than I (or the passers-by) might have liked.

“Why didn’t they buy any strawberries?” he asked crestfallen, after a handful of potential customers had passed us by.

“I guess they’re just not in the mood,” I consoled him, “Don’t lose heart. Give a berry to Sec and let her eat it.

She’ll be like a living commercial.”

He made three sales totally $.75 and when the fourth customer came and handed him a dollar, he was shocked to find he had to give the entire contents of his wallet over to the man in exchange for the bill.

“That’s OUR money!” he cried.

So I tried to explain to concept of “change” but I don’t think he got it because he just looked sad and defeated and asked, “Is this what it is like at a real strawberry sale? You have to give the money back?”

The man felt so bad he offered to let him keep the change. Of course, I declined his kind offer. But still, it did bring home the point: cute kids are closers. No doubt.

So anyone having a stoop sale this summer and needs a kid or two to bring in some business? Let’s talk.

A Veritable Shitstorm

As you will recall from my recent post, my daughter is no longer napping. Last week when I posted about this development, the unfortunate consequences of this were three in number, namely that she

1. Goes on a ripping rampage of any stray papers left in her, or my adjoining, bedroom
2. Has robbed me of the two hours of relative peace and work time that my sanity depends on
3. Has been an absolute, unrivalled, misbehavin’ mess of a child after the hour of 3pm. It works like this: As soon as I give up on the day’s nap, after about two hours of listening to her yell and destroy things, I release her from her “quiet time.” She smiles broadly and is blissfully happy at her tremendous victory for about five minutes. Then she yawns. And she instantly turns into the spawn of – I won’t say the devil – but one of his close relations. She is totally, completely unmanageable. She stomps up to 10 year-old boys and smacks them in their bellies (that’s as far as she can reach) for no reason whatsoever. Babies literally skitter away from her in terror. She is the menace of Park Slope.

And for a while, I thought these three downsides were about all I was going to have to deal with, in terms of the no-napping fall-out. Naïve, naïve. There is of course, awful consequence number 4 to be grappled with and it is that during the time my daughter should be napping, she:

4. Paints her body with fecal matter.

Her own, I mean. I guess that makes it a little better. I don’t know – the gross factor is so obscenely high, it’s really hard to judge. What I am trying to say is my daughter likes to take a dump in her diaper and smear it everywhere.

This has happened twice. I think you will agree that that is two times too many.

Cleaning up after a newborn who’s had a major butt blowout is one thing. Cleaning up after your two year-old who is using her bowel movements as some kind of guerilla warfare tactic is another thing altogether.

And she’s cleverly quiet about it too so I don’t hear anything and don’t come around to inquire. I mean, I should be alarmed by the silence but we parents know full well that when 30 minutes of peace falls into your lap, you are not going to question it.

And that is why my house is in the midst of an actual shitstorm.

Redcoats on the golf course

Here’s how me and my brood celebrated the Fourth of July – just the four of us, at my parent’s place in New Jersey, no BBQ, no red, white and blue, just some frank talk about our forefathers and a little war re-enactment.

We were in the mood for some low-commitment, easy outdoor frolicking, so we went to the only nearby playground, a run-down, kind of decrepit playarea in this rather upscale living community a few minutes up the road. I don’t really know what you call it – its’ not exactly a country club, and its not a pool club or a beach club, and you don’t need to show ID to get in, but it certainly looks like a club of some sort, with tennis courts and basketball courts, all these houses that look the same . . . and a run-down decrepit playground.

The one climbing apparatus they have is made of wood which I have to say is a poor choice, long-term – no sooner do you place your hand on the ladder but you’ve got a damn splinter. There are three swings, a sandbox I wouldn’t let my worst enemy stick his toe in, and a little ladder and slide area, whose crown jewel – a swirly slide -- has a jagged tear, right at the bottom so that you almost can’t help but get your leg caught as you are zooming through the slide. I don’t know what the deal is with this playarea but it does seem like the fancypants at Garden Springs are actively trying to rid themselves of children. They can’t get rid of us that easy, though – me and mine aren’t so terribly discriminating.

So we play for a while in the condemned playground and then we wander out a bit to pick pinecones and dandy-lions (this is what Primo calls any flowering weed he encounters and the way he says it – “Oh just look at that beeoo-tee-ful DANDY-lion!” – you’d be hard-pressed not to devour him right on the spot). Them Primo and Pops adventure a little further across the hilly lawn and soon they are calling to me and Seconda, “Come look at this beeoo-tee-ful view!” So we climb up and down and up and down the hills until we reach the place where the boys are standing, looking at a little man-made pond.

“We have reached the summit!” I shout, “And it is EXQUISITE!”

And as we are all standing there enjoying the peace of the tranquil water below us, a small white object whizzes by our heads at a terrific velocity.

“What in the Sam hell ---” I start.

“Golf balls,” my super-smart husband replies, “They’re hitting them right at us.”

“Maybe it was an accident,” I say, since even I have moments of Pollyanna within me.

But a second later, another high-speed golf missile grazes my head.

“We’re under attack!” I yell, “Run for your lives!”

“It’s the redcoats!” Primo yells delightedly, “The redcoats are COMING!”

And that is how the whole darn family was found on the fourth of July running through the Garden Springs golf course, reenacting the eve of the Revolutionary War by screaming at the top of our lungs, “THE REDCOATS ARE COMING THE REDCOATS ARE COMING!”

Better than a BBQ to honor our forefathers.

I love you in blue and ice cream at sunrise

Mixmaster King returns to my blog this Friday with some kick-ass paeans to our great city.



I love this shot so much I think it should be a friggin' postcard. I mean, don't you just feel, with total certainty, that that scrawl was written just for her, mystery girl of the dark shadow(and the amazing boots?)



People need their ice cream, even at sunrise.



When my son saw this picture, he said, "Its a Vincent Van Gogh picture!" And no formal art education, this kid. I mean, just check out that cloud.

Eyes Pried Open

This morning Seconda climbed into my bed and literally pried my eyes open with her fingers. I felt like the guy in A Clockwork Orange. For those of you who haven’t seen the movie, that’s not a good thing.

“Wake up Mommy!” she yelled, “OPEN YOU EYES!”

This is not as easy as she makes it seem. Opening my eyes in the morning, in fact, takes a monumental effort. Sweet sleep beckons me not to leave the bed. Darling, delicious sleep murmuring sweet nothings in my ear, while Seconda shouts

“Are you awake Mommy? MOMMY! YOU HAVE TO OPEN YOU EYES!!!!!”

The last accompanied by another vigorous eye-pry.

I have been particularly knackered lately. Conked out. Cooked. Fried. Flattened by fatigue. I mean, it’s not like the surreal haze of the newborn days when I didn’t know if it was day or night and I would just loose my boob every time I heard a noise that at all resembled a baby cry. This is just your garden-variety cumulative exhaustion.

So in the mornings, after my eyes are pried open by small dirty fingers, I’ve taken to shuffling over to the TV, bringing up some grade-A children’s programming and basically going back to sleep.

This is fine when it’s Primo that’s awake because he is 4/5 and pretty responsible. Seconda, on the other hand, must be heavily monitored at all times. She is drawn to trouble, this one. But I have been so friggin’ tired lately that the other day after I put the Backyardigans on for her, I lay on the couch and just closed my eyes, just for a minute.

When David came home from the coffee shop at 8 am, he found Sec with a paci in her mouth. Pacifiers are strictly limited to sleeping time but since Sec knows where we stash them, since she can climb chairs until she reaches that drawer, and since she was unsupervised while I dozed on the couch, why, she had her choice of pacis. Not only did she have the paci in her mouth but she was standing on our garbage can and had just pulled down a bar of Perugina chocolate which she was in the process of unwrapping when David walked in.

“Where is Mommy?” he asked.

She didn't bother taking the paci out of her mouth: “She can’t open her eyes.”

Tear shit up

Something unfortunate has occurred.

My daughter has stopped napping.

It’s the sort of thing that you know is coming, especially when you have an older child, but you just can’t quite believe that it’s time for it already. I mean, Seconda’s not even two and a half yet and I thought we had a good year at least of peaceful early afternoons before us. My son was at least 3 before he gave up his nap, and with him, it was a gradual process; he’d skip his nap for a couple of days, but I’d persist with our naptime ritual and he’d eventually cave in to sleep since there was nothing better to do, in the dark, in his crib.

Well Seconda has found plenty of better things to do in the dark. Not in her crib of course. That wildcat leaps out of her crib before I’ve even closed the bedroom door behind me. Most of the better things she’s found to do are highly destructive.

What I mean is, she likes to tear shit up. Literally. And the easiest thing to tear is, of course, books, Which in our house is tantamount to hurling the family’s crystal against the wall. I mean, I am willing to accept that my children do a lot of bad shit but tear up books?

“What did this book ever do to you?” I ask her, “All it wanted was to make you HAPPY and you’ve destroyed it!”

There was one time that Primo tore up his very beloved, very fancy, very expensive pop-up Wizard of Oz book. I don’t know if it was a masochistic thing or what, but it occurred during the tail end of the losing-the-nap period when he was stuck in his room for two hours with nothing to do. When I opened the door to release him from nap captivity, I saw all these beautiful bits of glimmering Emerald City and yellow bricks and pieces of poppy field scattered everywhere and I’m not going to lie to you, it hurt. I gave him such a stern talking-to then that he kind of has post-traumatic stress disorder about the whole episode. In fact, a year later, we were just sitting in the kitchen one morning talking and he told me that he had a horrible dream the night before.

“I dreamt that I tore up the Wizard of Oz pop-up book,” he said.

“That wasn’t a dream,” I informed him, “That happened.”

“No, no, that’s not right,” came his reply.

My stern reprimand scarred him enough that he hasn’t so much as dog-eared a page since.

Seconda, on the other hand. could care less about my little lectures or my time-outs or my yelling or my forcing her to read only board books until she proves that she deserves paperback again. During my stern talking-tos, she regards me with this bored kind of expression that is so awfully adolescent, I fear for the future.

“Whatever, lady, keep flapping your lips,” her eyes seem to say, “As soon as you turn your back, I’m ripping Puff’s face right of his magic body while Jackie Paper watches, then I’ll shred that sucker too.”