Skip to main content

Life Skills

 Our two-year-old daughter turned her pepperoni pizza into a pistol yesterday and spent several minutes dispatching bad guys around the house.  Ross and I exchanged simultaneous looks of surprise and amusement.  And then Ross paused what he was doing and corrected her form...just kidding.  He was one of the bad guys and just wanted to avoid getting tomato sauce on his shorts.  

The prior morning, during a family photo shoot, it was her sister that had us exchanging glances.  

"She's so cute rubbing those two sticks together."  

"Well, she's trying to start a fire...." 

Less cute. 

*Photo Credit: brownmoosephotography
Obviously, the girls keep close eyes on their brothers, and we in turn, have to keep close eyes on all four of them.  Sometimes we wonder if we're doing this parenting thing right.  Then we read another news headline and conclude that, "Yep, survival skills might come in handy.  We'll let that ride."

The skill set that might be my undoing, however, is the potty-training.  We are pretty much all in.  Spending $100/month on diapers will do that to you.  The girls think it's awesome.  Too awesome.  Two awesome.  Potty-training twins, for us, means stopping everything twice as much to make twice as many trips to the bathroom (if one is going the other one is absolutely going too) for twice as long (anything you can do, I can do better).  It means twice as many misses, messes, and rolls and rolls of toilet paper.  Twice as much laundry.  Twice as much handwashing and drying and soap everywhere.  Which is to say, it's not going exactly as neatly as I had hoped. 

While they may never be potty-trained, they will know how to share and take turns.  That is at least going well.  I mean, it still comes with a lot of screaming, but eventually they work it out.  It's better than it was...it's getting better. 

I expect it will get better soon.

I'm praying for their future spouses now.  

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Sheltering in Place

In the past three months Corona Virus has more or less turned the world on its head.  I feel almost guilty for not being more stressed or put out by the whole thing.  We have been extremely fortunate. What we thought was a most impractical move on our part, wound up being a huge blessing.  With our two boys and our two newborns, we moved out of our house with no yard in the city limits and into my parents' house in the country while waiting for our new house to be completed.  The weekend we moved "quarantine," "social distancing," and "shelter in place" became the new mantra of our state.   Moving in with my parents meant ten plus acres of play space and two extra able bodied adults to help even out the score with the four kids.  Win for the St. Clair's!  Unfortunately, my parents are beginning to realize they may have made an error in judgement.   Yesterday, Sawyer gave their cat swimming lessons.   Last week th...
1 comment
Read more

Advanced Placement

 Not to brag or anything, but I think we are raising some very advanced children.  At two-years-of-age, our girls have already worked out the art of manipulation and deflection.  It's the antithesis of endearing.   They went missing the other day - the girls did.  That's never a good situation.  They were in the house, and I knew they were in the house, but I couldn't see or hear them.  Silence is the loudest alarm system.  Fischer took action and found them both in my bathroom.   "MOM!" I met them in the hall.  Carter was covered in clumps and blobs of hand cream. "Emi did it," was her unsolicited response.   "No," I told her.  "I think you  did it." That night I got ready for bed and pulled out my one "self-care" splurge - my face cream .  It was in my drawer where I always keep it.  The lid was screwed on.  And it was empty, wiped clean.  "EmmmeerrrrrSON!" Guilty.  They were both ...
2 comments
Read more

Bump in the Road

 If your kids aren't annoying you at least occasionally, then they probably aren't doing childhood right.  Ours are winning at childhood.  Actually, we came to the conclusion the other day that if they are annoying you all the time, then you probably aren't doing parenting right.  And when I say "you," I mean "we."   We weren't enjoying our kids recently, and we wondered if that meant other people were also finding them unenjoyable.  It made us finally pause and take a long hard look at what was bugging us about our kids.  We felt like we were in a perpetual state of irritation.  Once we made our list, and it was lengthy, we noticed a theme: attention.  Our kids were begging for our attention with every behavior.  It was annoying, but it was our fault, and it was fixable.   We started putting down phones and brooms and laundry and giving undivided and intentional focus to our kids throughout the day.  It wasn't a huge...
Post a Comment
Read more