People warn you that when you have kids your life devolves into chaos. "Kids are so unpredictable," they'll tell you knowingly. "You never know what they're going to do next!"
That has not been my experience at all. If you want to figure out what a kid is going to do next, just shut your eyes and imagine the worst possible thing that could happen at any given moment, and you'll come close. If that method falls short, it's a failure of your own imagination, because you just weren't inventive enough to include a carton of eggs, a box of thumbtacks, the FedEx man, and a cat who has finally gotten fed up with this bullshit. Either that or something incomprehensibly precious is about to happen, which will be in its own way the worst possible thing because you will have been standing there trying to decide if a three-year-old is too big to be abandoned without consequence at the closest fire station*. And then you'll feel like a total shit when that child throws her tiny arms around your neck and says you smell like a nice mama. It's all part of the plan.
There's no chaos in parenting. If anything it's proof that the universe is a finely tuned machine capable of precision organization. How else can a child drop a glass jar in one bathroom so that it explodes into a million deadly shards at the precise moment that the other child is desperately trying to get into that bathroom to see in the full-length mirror whether she has missed any spots wiping up after her last bowel movement?
She always has.
So you have one child surrounded by a sea of broken glass and one child whose haunches are smeared with poop and these children want to switch places with each other and this is not going to end well if somebody doesn't step in and start being the grownup. It's definitely unreasonable. And awful. But it's not chaos.
*Legally, yes.
Ah, you said it sister. For THEM it all makes sense. But MY life devolves into chaos--the refrigerator I haven't cleaned out in a year, the clothes all over the floor but the laundry on the bed, etc.
For her, it's totally cool--it's how things should work.
Posted by: snozma | February 19, 2012 at 03:15 AM
Yup. If I had a dollar for every time I used a breakable plate with the boys and hoped they didn't eventually toss it on the floor and break it, but they did, I'd be a rich woman.
Posted by: Heather | February 19, 2012 at 01:32 PM