Toddler Tales

This morning the Head Girl said to me, "As soon as you get a chance, you must read a post by Krakovianka. It's the latest one, and it's about her toddler, who is very, um, adventurous." I nodded sleepily and turned on the computer. The HG shared a few of the details. I laughed (sorry, Krakovianka!). She shared another. I laughed harder, and then said, "I think this calls for a post about YOU when you were small."

She told me, "Well, she says, 'I would welcome suggestions for activities for a child like that! Donations of chocolate, coffee, and reciprocal toddler tales also gratefully accepted.'"

The HG and Equushick are only twenty months apart. I have never regretted this spacing (and neither have they). For one thing, had the HG already been two before I conceived her sister, it is possible she would have been an only child because I doubt very much I would have had the courage to parent another child. From the time she was two until she was four I was fairly certain I was a failure in the Mothering department, because surely a decent mother could prevent, well, the things I didn't prevent. I love to tell these stories now so much that the HG has been weary of them for years. One reason is simply because since she reached the age of four years of age, nobody would believe that this demure, responsible, mature, conservative, young woman could possibly have acted like that. It's as though she went through the terrible twos and all the troubled teen years (which we believe are mythical anyway) by the time she was four and then suddenly grew up and decided to behave.

Stories? Let me tell you stories.

She adored the baby, and insisted, in fact, that it was HER baby. At the hospital when we were getting ready to bring the new baby home the HG threw a full fledged temper tantrum, on her stomach kicking, screaming, and pounding the floor with her fists in fury because we would not let her carry the new baby out to the car.

She loved the baby so much I couldn't put the baby down anywhere without her trying to carry the baby around. The only place she had trouble reaching was the middle of our bed- it was high and a steep climb with not much to hold onto. So one day when I had to get some things done and had been constantly interrupted by the HG trying to grab the Equuschick, I stripped the sheets, put the baby on a small blanket in the center of the mattress and tried to get to work. I came into the room to find the HG on the other side of the bed, stealthily trying to reach the corner of the blanket and pull it towards her. She had just reached the corner of the blanket when I walked in. I could just see her eyes over the top of the mattress. In desperation I sternly told her, "That's it, that's IT, do you hear me? Leave the baby alone. Don't touch her, not so much as a single touch, every again. Don't lay so much as one single finger on that baby again." We eyed each other warily. Very slowly and deliberately, she lifted up one chubby little finger and gently touched her sister with it.

She tried to toilet train her baby sister when said sister was six weeks old. They were supposed to be napping. She managed to climb out of her crib, sneak quietly into my room, get the baby, and I found her dipping the baby feet first into the toilet saying, "Go potty, baby. Go potty."

Another time she found the baby powder and completely covered her sister in it- completely. The baby was fully dredged in baby powder. Twice. The second time was exactly one week after the first time. You see, we'd been getting ready for church (the HM was working nights then, and this was midweek Bible study and we didn't have a car so had to get a ride from somebody else) when I found the powder coated baby and the guilty HG in the act. I thought the powder was empty and I was in a major hurry, so I set it behind the curtain on the windowsill (it was the closest flat surface out of the HG's sight)- and forgot about it. She did not forget. The very next Wednesday night at exactly the same hour she pulled it out and repeated the peformance. I did take a picture that time.

But the best story of all.... well. First a wee bit of background. My husband was military. We owned one car. We lived 20 minutes from the base. I had two in diapers and two in carseats. We lived in a small house with a floor plan like a box with interconnecting doors. That is, you could start in the living room, walk straight ahead into the dining room, turn right into our bedroom, turn right into the bathroom, turn right into the children's bedroom/playroom, turn right and be back in the living room. The kitchen was the only room that wasn't part of the circle. It was to the left of the dining room. My washer and dryer were in the kitchen, my fridge in the dining room, and my microwave in the bedroom.

The HG had rough weekend, which meant that so did I. From Friday through Monday morning she got about two hours of sleep, which meant so did I. On Monday we made a doctor appointment. Naturally, the doctor appointment was early enough that I had to to take the HM to work, but late enough that I had to just hang out at the base until the appointment, there not being enough time to come home and do anything reasonable like nap. We finally got home, the two babies and I, just before 1:00. I think we ate McDonald's for lunch. I was a walking zombie, barely functioning.
The baby was ready for her nap and I put her down in the playpen (she was about 15 months old by then) which usually held toys, but that day needed to hold a sleeping baby safely. The HG I took to bed with me because I did not trust her. I looked at the clock just before I got into bed. It was exactly 1:00. I don't remember anything after that, but I was awakened by the sound of splashing water and the toilet flushing. The HG had gotten up, had gotten her sister out of the playpen and they were in the bathroom flushing books down the toilet under the HG's direction. I looked at the clock. It was 1:15. That fifteen minutes had apparently been something of a power nap, because I didn't feel like a zombie anymore, just very cranky. I took care of the book flushing incident, put both girls in their room, shut the door, and went to make the bed. It was a waterbed. The HG had found a needle and thread on the nearby dresser and had poked several holes in the mattress, leaving the needle and thread sticking out. I said something very sharp, and walked into the kitchen to get the patch kit. I stopped in the dining room and said something very sharp and very, VERY loud, because the HG had been there first. She had taken a bag of onions and rubbed all the skins off all over the floor and then poured cooking oil over the mess. To get the cooking oil she had to have gone in the kitchen and climbed up over the stove. I hurried into the kitchen. She had opened the oven door, pulled out the racks and used them like steps to the top of the gas oven- which had to be lit with a match. In climbing up she had turned on one of the knobs and it was slowly seeping gas. I suppose we could say that by flushing books down the toilet she saved our lives (after first trying to kill us). That is what we could say. That's not what I did say. I don't know, actually, exactly what I did say, but it was very, very loud and had something to do with it being a very, very, VERY good thing that the HG had already been punished for the book flushing incident and was safely behind doors in her own bedroom because if she wasn't I, I, I, I, I, and there followed lots of sputtering, loud sputtering and incoherent threats as I turned off the stove, got the patch kit, patched the bed quickly, and went back to the kitchen. Something was wrong, I realized. I had been so distracted by the open oven and the gas seeping from the stove that I had not noticed that the drier door was also standing wide open. I kept a bottle of glue on the windowsill behind the drier because the HG could not reach it there. It was gone. I went into the living room.
The HG had taken the glue and torn magazine pages out, crumpled them up and glued them to everything. The chair, the couch, the rug, everything. She had also glued one of her baby dolls to the rug. And she had glued the Headmaster's flight jacket to the floor and glued magazines to that.

Keep in mind she did all this in fifteen minutes. I figured she'd been laying awake at night for weeks mapping out the floor plan and the most efficient plan of attack she could imagine. She'd succeeded. The glue was still wet. That's how fast this all happened. Because it was still wet (and so thick it hadn't had time to get tacky let alone dry), clean up was actually fairly easy. It was also loud. Very loud. I relieved my feelings by shouting very mature things like, "Ooooooh, I can't believe you!! Ooooh, it's a good thing you are in your room!!!! Oooooh, don't you ever, ever, every, ever, ever get on the stove again, do you hear me?" Everybody heard me. The girls were very, very quiet.

I cleaned up the glue. I put the flight jacket in the washing machine along with all the towels used in the process. I sat down with my head in my hands. I cried. I caught my breath. I decided to be calm and mature and wonderful. I decided to run away to South America. It might be easier. I decided to go apologize to the girls and snuggle on the bed with some books. I opened their bedroom door.

All the clothes in their dressers had been removed and tossed out all over the room. The drawers were also removed and upside down on the floor. All the posters on the walls were torn down. It was 1:30 in the afternoon and it would be four more hours before my husband would be home. My husband, who had once said to me that he thought that things like this could never happen to parents who were paying attention.

That was before we had children.