Fear and Parenting in Las Vegas

For the past two years, every paper Boo has brought home from school has been perfect.

No, she’s not perfect.

She makes lots of mistakes.

It’s just that, for the past two years, she’s had the opportunity to fix them before her teacher’s red pen hit the page.

Now, she’s flying without a net.

She forgot to check and make sure she did both sides of a worksheet.

She mixed up a “p” and an “a.”

She confuses her “d”s and “b”s.

She’s under time constraints and is feeling the pressure.

Her teacher is nice, but focused on performance, not feelings.

Boo is learning hard lessons.  She’s feeling the pressure. The days of getting by with her charm are over.

She’s got to deliver the goods. She’s got to take her time to do it right the first time. She’s got to focus on the task at hand.

Tough stuff when you’re six.

This morning, I dropped my three-year-old son, Doodle off at the same daycare/preschool that he’s attended since he was six weeks old.

I nearly forgot it was the start of a new “school” year and he would be changing rooms.

He was already familiar with his new teachers, having had them in other rooms at other stages of his development.

But this time, when I dropped him off, his new teacher asked me a question…

Is there anything you’d like me to know?

Well, yes. There are a few things you should know about my son.

• He loves trains and dinosaurs.
• He gets grumpy when he is tired and/or hungry.
• When we drop him off, he’ll usually start his day with a banana.
• He’ll be the last child to settle for his nap and the hardest one to wake up.
• Please don’t let him nap longer than an hour and a half. Otherwise he’ll be impossible at bedtime.
• We’ve given up the fight for a nap at home on weekends and holidays. He is allowed to play quietly in his room while I regain my sanity.
• He’s a picky eater, and manage to make a mess with whatever he decides to put in his mouth.
• He’ll greet whomever is picking him up with a smile and hug that makes him/her believe he’s been waiting all day just to see him/her.
• His favorite movie is “Cars” and his favorite hairstyle is “spiky.”
• He’s fully potty trained, but likes an audience and needs help wiping.
• He needs to work on his language and fine motor skills so he can be ready for his Pre-K evaluation at Ye Olde Catholic school this spring.
• He loves to ride bikes and go down slides the wrong way.
• He’s broken his arm twice on playground equipment. He’s a risk taker and does not bounce well.
• You can usually get him to share if you ask him to “take turns.”
• He does well with a routine and clear and consistent expectations, but he reserves the right to change the rules on you at any time.
• Sometimes he falls apart, the only thing that will calm him down is to hold him and hold him tight. Yes, he will fight you, and may take a swing at you. His cries can peel the paint off the walls, but he will settle into a heap of sobs and cling to you with profuse apologies for his transgression. He will love you even more for teaching him how to pull his shit together.
• His best friend is the little curly redhead boy. They’re always together and can’t leave each day without hugging each other.
• He’s learned to put his shoes on.
• He’s a master manipulator. Don’t believe him when he tells you he can’t do something. Please don’t let him get away with it.
• Please don’t soothe his moods with food. If you feed him healthy stuff on a regular basis, you should be fine. Giving him cookies and sweet stuff turns him into exactly what you’re trying to avoid — a blonde tornado of preschool hell. Sweets are cool on occasion and (please) not just before he comes home.
• It takes a village to raise this little man, so you’ll see quite the cast of characters trouping through this room at pickup and dropoff. There will be me and his dad, our respective partners, aunts, uncles, cousins, grandmas, grandpas, and an awesome babysitter. Have no fear. He knows his people.
• I fully expect him to come home filthy each day. It’s how I know he’s had fun.
• Hug him often and remind him he is loved.

I am thankful, dear teacher, that you’ve decided that locking yourself in room with a dozen 3-4 year-olds is your life’s calling. It’s a job that I would take only if the alternative was being Paris Hilton’s publicist.

If there’s something you need, please don’t hand me a gift wrap or cookie dough catalog. I have enough paper for three Christmases and my ass needs cookie dough like Angelina Jolie’s lips need botox. Just tell me what you need and we’ll get it.

If my angel is being a pain in the ass, please tell me. Trust me, this will not be news. Let’s work together to figure out why he’s being an asshole and fix it together. Because, in the end, we want angels, not assholes, right? The world has enough of the latter.

So, here’s to a great school year. I look forward to bawling with you this next August when we look back on how much he’s grown and changed as he heads off to reform Catholic school with his big sister.

Love,

Doodle’s Mom (but you can call me Nancy)

It’s the first day of school and NO ONE wants to get up.

Doodle refuses to get dressed….to eat breakfast…to brush his teeth…to get in the car…to pretty much do anything I need him to do.

En route to school, I check my calendar (at a stoplight) and discover that Boo has a half day and there is no after care. I failed to make arrangements with Steve or family to pick her up, so the busy nine hour day I had planned is now an insane three hour blur.)

I check Twitter (again at a stoplight) and see that it’s supposed to be #complaintfreemonday. I sigh and resolve to focus on the good stuff. After all, I get to share in Boo’s first day of school and get 1:1 time with her in the afternoon, right?

First day of school drop off = parking lot madhouse. We barely get to class on time because I have to park in the deepest recesses of the parking lot.

Boo has no interest in standing still for 30 seconds for me to get shots like this….

I discover, on the hike back to the car, that I chose the worst possible shoes to wear for hiking across lawns and parking lots. (I take some solace in knowing that at least I look good and then I remember how ugly and pained women look when they’re hobbling like I am at that very moment. So instead of looking good, I just look like a wobbly jackass.)

I smack the back of my minivan into a light pole, smashing one of the sensors that should have been beeping to warn me that I was going to hit something. The rest of the car is fine. Just the damn sensor.

I pull back into a neighboring space and take a moment to cry. Not because my baby’s growing up, but because I am obviously too inept to function today.

I am so late that I do not have time for coffee.

I am a half hour late for work.

My three-hour blur of speed-work is now a two-and-a-half-hour blur. My boss is patient and understanding of my plight, but is obviously not thrilled with my memory fail.

I rush out of the office at 11 with plans to run two work-errands on the way to get Boo. One gets done. The intended second errand is sucked into the time/space vortex that is random, unexplainable Vegas traffic.

I manage to get to the school’s drive-through pick up line before school lets out. *yea me!* However, teacher’s vague instructions (i.e., “we’ll be under the big tree”) turns into epic panicky fail when I realize the school has been there since the dawn of time immortal and all the trees are “big trees.” I abandon my running car wedged in the pickup line and flag familiar parents to see if they’ve seen Boo.

Curse my shoe choice yet again as I hike to the tree that is the furthest away from my car. I find Boo and assure the confused teacher that, yes I am her mother, and yes, she did meet me yesterday, and no I am not here to kidnap her and leave her rotting corpse in the desert.

Boo and I hike back to vehicle only to be ushered through the lot right in front of the tree where the girl had been waiting. Hiking was unnecessary. Next time, I vow to activate my patience brain chip and deactivate paranoid fear of Boo feeling left and/or forgotten.

Afternoon plan to be productive from home = epic fail. Efforts to teach the girl to entertain herself without the use of television or computers = substantial fail. I gave up and let her watch TV just so I could check my work email and get a few small projects done.

I take a break to research the cost of replacing my parking sensor. Without replacing it, none of the sensors will work. I shake my fist at the sky and curse the automotive industry for adopting Christmas light engineering and technology. The repair will run $400-$600. My deductible is $500.

The freelance project money that had been designated for the vacay fund is now mostly re-designated to vehicle repairs. At least I’ll be able to bank some in the vacay fund.

I console my lack of work productivity by dragging Steve and Boo out on errands before retrieving Doodle from daycare. Steve and I decide to give the dog a shot of uncrated freedom in our absence since all he does is lay on his pillow and sleep all day.

We stop at the bank, Starbucks, Petsmart (to get blockade supplies for Max who somehow thinks there are tootsie rolls in the cat litter), and Home Depot. A happy Doodle is retrieved from his day keepers and we head home.

After our tow-hour excursion, we arrive home. We cannot get into the house through the garage because the door from the kitchen was somehow locked and our keys don’t work in that lock. I blame Boo.

We hike around to the front door and enter to discover the dog had not slept in our absence. Instead, he has shredded the vertical blinds on four windows, scratched the paint on two doors down to the bare wood/metal, and gouged about an inch into a patch of drywall. The sofa is in tact and I count myself lucky.

Massive cleanup begins. Fortunately we are able to relocate blinds from the back of the house to cover most of the damage to the damaged blinds on windows facing the street. We start a shopping list, Vacay fund is about to be at $0.

At least the kids went down with relatively little fuss and, thanks to my late-day Starbucks, I have the energy to clean 10 houses.

The downside of that much caffeine — I was not asleep until nearly 1 a.m. and my wake-up call was 5:30 a.m.

So much for a #complaintfreemonday. At least I waited until Tuesday to bitch about how heinous Monday was. That counts, right?