Posts Tagged ‘bored’

Will Work For Goldfishes

Monday, November 29th, 2010

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.

Slimed

Thursday, March 11th, 2010

Our house has been invaded by those horrible anthropomorphic snot creatures from the cold medicine commercial. Daddy, Mommy and Baby Snot Creature have all taken up residence in Daddy, Mommy and Baby Evan and are settling in for an extended stay. If only I could remember what the commercial was actually FOR I could go buy some of it and maybe we would feel better.

So far the cough is my only symptom but E claims he also has an overwhelming sense of ickiness and the baby is a little bit grumpy (although he’d feel a lot better if he would just let me WIPE HIS NOSE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD). Otherwise, no fevers, no pains, no need to see a pediatrician, no idea when it will go away. We’re trapped in a miserable purgatory of being too sick to go to group activities  where we could possible contaminate people but nowhere near sick enough to lie around sleeping all day. I’m making an effort to still make it to Stroller Strides as much as possible, just because it breaks up the monotony of 14 straight hours of snotty baby care, but today we were supposed to RUN and running is just not possible when you have to stop and cough up a lung every few feet.

I’m going to feel like an idiot when I realize in a month we aren’t sick, we just have allergies and this self imposed quarantine was pointless. But I would feel even worse if one of the littler babies ended up with RSV because I couldn’t handle playing with my kid at home for a few days. Which I will definitely do as soon as I can find him under all that snot.