My toddler needs a job.

Have you ever been unemployed? It sucks. You sit around all day alternating between feeling miserable and sorry for yourself and sudden bursts of energy where you vow to use every second of your free time as a chance to finally organize your pantry/paint all your baseboards/read War & Peace/write those thank you notes from last Christmas. For a little while, having a MISSION and a PLAN and GOALS makes you forget how much it sucks that no one is paying you to do anything. Then you realize no one actually gives a shit if your baseboards are dirty and fall into the pit of despair and crawl back under your Snuggie to watch Judge Judy and feel sorry for yourself while moaning about how unfair everything is.

That’s what life is like every day with a 19 month old. For him, not for me. My job of simply keeping him alive is almost more than I can handle most days.

Only instead of acting out in normal ways, like excessive morning drinking and crying at the grocery store, he expresses his displeasure at feeling unimportant by dumping an entire bowl of Cheerios on the floor and stomping on them. Or by throwing my iPhone at the dog. Or by appointing himself Mayor of Trash and freaking the freak out every time anyone else tries to pick up/throw away things. OMG HOW COULD YOU MAMA THAT GRANOLA BAR WRAPPER WAS MY OWN SPESHUL FAVORITE THING??!?!

I’ve tried getting him involved in various household chores -“Honey, can you hand Mommy the silverware from the dishwasher?” “Ok, where do the dirty diapers go?” “Yah! Let’s pick up our toys! What a fun game!” – but he’s a toddler, not an idiot. He knows those are just dirty tricks to make him think he’s helping and not His Job. So far I haven’t been able to come up with anything toddler appropriate (he can’t feed the dog because he eats the dog food), time consuming (especially between the hours of 10:30 am and noon aka SCREAM’O’CLOCK), and exhausting (because, really, isn’t tiring him out the whole point?) enough to count as WORK. 19 months is too young for chores though, right? I mean besides what I’m already doing? Or did I already miss the boat on helping and now he’s going to be a lazy, selfish man-child slob his entire life?

Man, this parenting thing is super fun and stress free.

I don’t suppose there’s some sort of waiver I can sign that lets him work at Target, right? I miss the discount.

I took a huge step on Sunday and left Baby Evan in the nursery at church for the first time ever. It took me 5 minutes just to walk out of the room and 5 more of peering through the door to make sure he was ok before I made it back to the service, but I did it. And he was fine. He was actually better than fine, he was totally happy to be playing with a whole room full of new toys and other kids to yell at instead of sitting in my lap in the service being told to shhhhhh constantly.

Apparently my subconcious was much more upset about the decision than I was because Sunday night I had the absolute worst baby dream EVAR. I dreamed – in a horribly realistic fashion – that when E and I went to visit my parents for Christmas, we left Baby Evan in his crib. In the dream, we discussed bringing him with us but decided he was going to be too much of a hassle to travel with and we’d just get someone to watch him for the 7 days we’d be gone. But we both forgot to actually get someone to watch him and made it all the way to Virginia before we remembered. The next four hours of my nightmare was spent trying to find the phone number for my next door neighbor, calling people we knew who might be able to come check on Baby Evan, fighting with the bizare woman who answered the phone when I called the baby store that ended when she called Child Protective Services and told me I’d never see my baby again.

You know how in dreams, sometimes you’re conscious of what you should be doing but your dream self refuses to comply? Clearly, if I really did forget my baby, I would turn around and drive right back to get him (although after that nightmare the chances of forgetting the baby are even more minuscule then they were before – I’m never again leaving a ROOM without him, let alone the state). But in my dream E and I had a very serious discussion about whether or not Baby Evan would starve to death if we just stayed 5 days instead of 7. And we wondered if $500 was enough to pay the neighbor’s teenage daughter to come over and watch him for a while.  I think at one point E mentioned there was water in the dog’s bowl (which the dog didn’t need because we REMEMBERED TO BRING THE DOG) and the baby would figure it out.

I woke up even more exhausted than I was when I went to bed and feeling like the worst mother in the world. I spent all day Monday making up my horrible (imaginary) parenting to Baby Evan with lots of hugs and patience and taking him everywhere I went. I was rewarded with no baby-abandoning dreams Monday night. Clearly, my subconscious and I have some issues to work out before I try to leave the baby in the nursery again.

What do you mean pill bottles don’t make excellent rattles? And also chew toys?