“Dad and me are going to a movie, just us boys.” Milo was rubbing it in as Naomi looked at him with her big brown eyes.”
“Well, Naomi and I are going to get our nails done and then go out to coffee!” I shot back. I like to fight back with hyperbole…it’s not as if I ever get the nails on my crusty strictly-utilitarian hands painted. I just claimed the first girly extravagance that came to mind, and made it an expensive one to get a jab in at Jeremiah too. By “get our nails done” what I really meant was walk down to the pharmacy and buy a bottle of nail polish from their startlingly complete collection. Purple sparkly, of course.

We put purple sparkles over a pink base for a stunning result to these nails. I even dabbed a drop on each ear lobe, trying to convince her to get her ears pierced.

At the café Naomi downed her three pink marshmallows in quick succession (did you know that little girl can fit three whole marshmallows in her maw simultaneously?). Then she ate the frosting off her lemon bar and rejected her fluffy.

Saturday morning Milo was at my elbow (as always) when I realized that I hadn’t seen Naomi in a while. I poked my head around the door and found her in the middle of a carefully laid-out doll arrangement; bed made, high chair ready, babies all dressed.

That morning she had put on her “princess dress,” chose a green cardi, and packed her purple hand bag in readiness for the outing to a theatrical rendition of Snow White. “I need to pee in the grass,” she said with urgency when we got there. At least she’s not too prim.

Neither kid wanted to cooperate for a photo, but what I WANTED was a nice picture of them in front of the Alice in Wonderland poster–Milo and I watched that play together the day Naomi was born.

The playground…where all best tidbits are learnt.

“Why do kids say damn it?”  Milo’s question came from the back of the car as I was negotiating a road detour.

“What was that?”  I pulled my attention back from the road and focused on my son.  I wanted to make sure I had heard him correctly.  He’s only five, but he did start public school recently.

“Why do kids say “Damn It”? he repeated.

“Hum…” I stalled.  “When do they say that?”

“Oh, sometimes they say ‘dang it,’ and sometimes they say ‘damn it.’”  His answer wasn’t very specific.

“Well, to “Damn” something means to send it to hell, so people say that when they’re frustrated….”  I’ve been pretty lax on my religious education, being uncertain of my own doctrine most of the time, and I don’t think we have had this discussion before.  “Milo, do you know what Hell is?”

“No,” he says.  My mind goes forward and backward, over the old familiar “Hell is an awful place where you go when you die if you’ve been bad in your life,” to “Hell is where you go if you don’t ask Jesus to forgive you for your sins,” to “Hell is complete separation from God.”  I’m guessing the last explanation is not going to be very motivational to him.  We’ve passed churches in the past and he’s asked what they’re for.  “They’re where people go to learn about God.  Would you want to do that?”  “No,” he said definitively.  Alright then.

I went with the first explanation.  Even as I say it the scriptures are reverberating in my memory. “All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God…”  “….it is the gift of God, not by works, that no one should boast….”  “…they will be judged according to their actions…”  Clearly actions matter.  Clearly no one is sinless.  There must be a process for redemption, involving Jesus dying.  Damn it!  I obviously haven’t sorted this out in my own mind yet.

“But Milo, saying “Damn” is considered very rude in our language, and we don’t use that word.  You can think of more creative ways to express yourself.  People who swear haven’t learned more interesting words to say how they feel.”  I was struggling, and starting to babble.  Something forbidden has a strong allure.  How can I make swearing seem unattractive, while still encouraging the expression of strong feelings?

“Mom, why is the road closed?”  Ah, onto the next subject, for the time being.

It happens to every mother eventually. The Grand Grocery Store Tantrum.
Today was my day.

I didn’t have the wherewithal to turn and snap her photo as she stood blubbering in the grocery store, surrounded by a retinue of concerned citizens. I can rest assured that there will be a next time, unfortunately. In lieu of the genuine photo, here’s another of my gorgeous girl–she was sitting on the top step preventing any other child from accessing the balance beam.

“I’m going to do that grocery shop today after all,” I informed Jeremiah. “I need canned tomatoes for dinner.”

“Which kid do you want to take?” Jeremiah had generously had both kids for the morning to give me a little space, and now he understandably didn’t want to be left with both at home while I ‘escaped’ to the grocery store.

“Naomi, get your shoes on, you can come with me.” Miscalculation Number One. Until recently she was hands down the easiest, but her affable nature hasn’t been so reliable these days.

“Naomi, this is a Look-And-Don’t-Touch store,” I reminded her as she fingered the pears. “Look with your eyes but keep your hands to yourself.” She promptly plucked a head of broccoli from the sale display.

“She likes broccoli!” a kind woman exclaimed.

“She does,” I said grimly, “but we have some at home. “Naomi, if you touch stuff on the shelves again, you’ll have to ride in the cart.”

We had only just turned into the cracker aisle when she started filching all the pink boxes. “Sorry Naomi, you’re touching; you’re going to have to ride.” I picked her up and she did her impression of an eel, wriggling out of the cart, protesting loudly. Miscalculation Number Two: The threat of discipline wasn’t enough to command good behavior, and neither was the discipline itself. We’ve entered the tired zone. We’ve gone beyond logic. We’re in Tantrum Territory!

I maneuverered stolidly down the rest of the aisle, holding her squirminess in place with my arm. “Naomi, do you want to choose your pink cookies?” “NnnnOo!” Preschoolers can get a lot into that one syllable word. Deciding we really didn’t need any more cookies, I leaned down to her ear. “Naomi! At the end of this aisle you can have another chance to walk without touching the stuff on the shelves. Do you think you can keep your hands to yourself?” “NNNnnOo!” Alright then.

The end of the aisle finally arrived, and I let her down. She stood there, bedraggled and crying.

“Do you want to walk?”
“NNNnnOo!”
“Do you want to ride?”
“NNNnnOo!”
“Well, I’ve got to keep shopping. I’ll be right down this next aisle. Come along.”

“Mommy! Mommy! Moooommyyyyy!” Miscalculation Number Three: it was 4:30 on a Saturday afternoon. The store was full of nice, concerned women and even a few concerned men. As I distanced myself from my dishevelled daughter, I saw a crowd form around her.

“Have you lost your mummy?” A kindly grandma with a cane was leaning over Naomi as her tears flowed.

I grabbed a can of tomato sauce and turned around. “No, she’s mine. She’s not lost. She’s just having a tantrum. Come on, Naomi!” I held out my hand. She yanked hers back. We repeat the scene:

“Do you want to walk?”
“NNNnnOo!”
“Do you want to ride?”
“NNNnnOo!”

“She’s tired,” a well-meaning grandfather stated the obvious. “She wants something.”

“Yup,” I say. “She’s just having a tantrum. I’m sure she does want something.” I refrained from starting a tirade with “if she’s tired, what do you think I am?”

A middle-aged woman touched my arm and leaned into my ear. “Good on ya!” It’s the Kiwi way of giving approval, and I felt a fraction better. At least one other person realized that I wasn’t being a horrible mother to leave my daughter sobbing on the floor. I was simply taking the only tenable course available at the end of all my miscalculations—not giving in to the tantrum.

“Well Naomi, you know where I’ll be.” I turned around and headed back down the aisle, this time amidst the troubled audience of a dozen childless shoppers. The wails didn’t abate. I picked up another can of tomato sauce and returned. There was a traffic jam around my child. It was clear that my method of parenting wasn’t working in a crowded grocery store. I scooped her up and sat her, still protesting, on the handle bar of the cart. We marched grimly on.

Turning the corner into the frozen food aisle, I stopped to choose some bread on an endcap. “We need three loaves of bread,” I said.

“Me do it!” Naomi was ready to be back in the action.

“Ok,” I agreed, as she grabbed one package after another. I didn’t care what kind we got. The noise had stopped, as if a switch had been flicked. She skipped ahead.

“Mom, we need pink humus!”

“We already have pink humus at home.”

“Ok! Ooh, these bags are COLD!” She poked at the frozen vegetables, cheerfulness restored.

“Yes, they’re frozen, don’t touch them. Let’s get some cheese.”

“Me do it!” I hoped my fellow tantrum-observing shoppers would see her now. Helpful. Sunny. Normal. We finished our rounds with milk and wine, then queued up to pay. The concerned grandfather lined up behind us, and I could see him eyeing my daughter in her changed state.

“She stopped.” I stated, flatly. “They always do.”

True Calculation Number One: They do (eventually) always stop.

True Calculation Number Two (just for the record…):
They do (eventually) always sleep as well.

“Morning, milo is such a good wee boy and very polite, u must be very proud of him.”  Vicky’s text came at 9:46 this morning and I was still shaking my head over the irony at morning tea break.  Vicky has Milo for an hour before school and brings him to class on the days I work.

“I guess it’s a good thing he has manners that he can put on when needed, I just wish he’d put them on for me,” I complained to my colleagues at work.

Just this morning he was having an absolute melt-down over the low level of milk in his oatmeal, Again. The dialogue typically goes like this:

I plunk a bowl of oatmeal down in front of Milo, add a generous dollup of milk, and steel myself for the inevitable.
“It’s stiff! It’s too stiff!” Milo whinges, as he plunges his spoon into the center. “I want more milk!”
I administer another tablespoon. “It’s stiff! It’s still too stiff!” Milo continues, unabated.
“Milo, if I add more milk, it won’t even stay on your spoon!” I exclaim, pointing at the creamy white puddles sitting atop the cereal.
“It’s stiff! It’s too stiff!” There’s actually no connection between the amount of milk in the cereal and the level of protest from my son. It’s just the usual morning ritual.
A while back I got a brain wave—they’re few and far between these days—what if I gave him control of his own milk administration? I have a little pitcher….

Brilliant!  The pitcher worked.  At least 80% of the days it works, and this just didn’t happen to be one of those days.  In fact, this morning, he even threw his spoon at me.  Well, to be fair, I instigated a little bit—I told him that the other way to get a higher milk-to-oatmeal ratio was for me to eat some of the oats, and then I dipped my spoon in for a bite.  He promptly snatched it. “Dad, Milo grabbed my spoon,” I wailed, in an attempt to diffuse the situation with a bit of ridiculousness.  He then hurled his spoon at me.  Well, that bit of parental creativity didn’t work.

The very next day Milo came home from school brandishing his first certificate.  “Congratulations to Milo Shaw,” it read.  “For always being so polite, respectful and helpful at school.  You are a kind friend, Milo!”

“Oh, I’m so proud of you!” I purred.  Of course what I was really thinking is “What, my son?!  So what happens as soon as he comes home?”

I’ve talked to other moms, and they corroborate this phenomenon with their kids.  For some reason, the person who the government pays to teach them how to read garners more respect than the person who feds them, clothes them, and worries over them.  In fact, any other adult gets more respect than the parents.  It’s not fair.

Well, as my own dad always said, “The World’s Not Fair.”

I hear screeching from the tub, and I enter to find Milo stretched full length attempting to practice his bubbling at the expense of Naomi’s space and comfort. Rugs were askew, and water soaked the bath mat. A sodden washcloth was dripping over the side onto the floor, where the lino has already been patched after buckling under the moisture.

“Right, Milo, you’re first to get your hair washed.” More screeching. I don’t care. In the back of my mind I know there’s more peaceful, humane way to bathe children, but I’m too frazzled to figure it out. So frazzled, in fact, that I try rubbing conditioner into his scalp and then wonder why it doesn’t lather.

“Naomi, if you splash any more water out of the tub, you’re getting out.”

“Me out!” she offered.

“Alright,” I agree, surprised and pleased that she volunteered. “Let me get your towel.”

There the agreeability ended. I put the towel on wrong. She didn’t want her hair rubbed. She wanted to leave the bathroom and trail water over the living room carpet. “No! no! NO!” she squawked, while my nerves jangled. Forcefully dried just shy of dripping, she exited at full tilt. I don’t remember how Milo got out, but he must have reached his towel on his own and gone streaking through the door.

I surveyed the soggy mess that we call a bathroom, then went and got a clean pair of undies from my drawer. I needed a shower too. And the bathroom needed a clean, or at least the tub did. No use doing the sink on a Sunday, when Jeremiah shaves on a Monday. I turned the key in the lock, the one door in the house that has a lock, hoping for a few moments of solitude.

Thirty seconds later the mayhem started outside the door. There’s an unwritten rule of motherhood—if you close yourself behind a door, the kids will suddenly feel the urgent need to be with you. Naomi, insulted by something or other, started wailing and pounding on the door. “Mommy! MomMee! MoMEEEE!” Milo, not to be outdone, started jiggling the door nob, peeved at finding it unyielding. I undressed, then started cleansering the tub.

The hubbub gets louder outside. I turn on the warm water, and stand under it for a moment. I hear some hard object hit the door, and vaguely wonder what it was. Jeremiah’s home, so presumably if real damage is being done, he’ll intervene eventually.

The noise outside doesn’t abate. I consider my exit strategy. There is one window to the outdoors, but it’s narrow and awkwardly high above the laundry wash sink, with a significant drop to the ground below. Plus it’s on the neighbor’s side.

I slowly wring out the myriad washcloths the kids had used, plus the sodden hand towel that had been roped into the scene. I leisurely pulled on my clothes. I plucked a few eyebrows. I considered washing the toilet. I wished I had remembered to grab my phone so I could read national geographic. I leaned on the door, contemplating the yowls still going strong on the other side. Then I felt foolish. How could I expect to escape mommy responsibilities by hiding in the bathroom? That’s five-year-old logic.
And besides, it didn’t work.

I sighed, wondering how life got to be so chaotic, and turned the key.

Unbeknownst to me, Jeremiah wasn’t trying to assuage the situation, but was instead recording it.

We could start the day with 10 M&Ms rattling in a jar for each child, gleaming reds, blues, yellows, greens. Each time I heard a nasty name fall from a pair of lips, the offender lost an M&M.

We’ve used M&M’s as kid currency before—they’re our potty training incentive of choice, as a matter of fact.  But never with such astonishing rapidity of results as this time.

The kids have gotten into a bad habit of calling each other names.  “Stupid” is a favorite, and “You poo poo” another popular choice.  Not very sophisticated yet, but I’m sure that’s around the corner.

I get why they want to do it.  Heck, I want to indulge in a bit of barbed verbage too from time to time.  But it’s not an endearing habit, and that’s what it had become—thoughtless arrows flung back and forth as a type of spiteful hackle-raising game.

Unfortunately, a parent has very little actual control of what comes out of a child’s mouth.  We can set consequences, that’s all.  And I was struggling to come up with something appropriate that I could muster the energy to maintain and which would cope with the dozens of transgressions per day that we were seeing.

That’s when I thought of M&Ms.  They’re small, yet tantalizing.  We could start the day with 10 M&Ms rattling in a jar for each child, gleaming reds, blues, yellows, greens.  Each time I heard a nasty name fall from a pair of lips, the offender lost an M&M.  I fully expected to eat 20 M&Ms that first day, and was struggling to figure out what I’d do in the likely event that Milo’s M&Ms were gone before lunch and he had no more incentive left.

But they surprised me.  Those little squirts seem to really care about those M&Ms!  The first morning Naomi lost two right off the bat.  Milo took notice, and managed to hang on to 8 of his until dinner time, and Naomi wasn’t far behind. I dolled out the prizes, praised the non-miscreants, and decided that deflation would start the next day.  Right now the price seems to be right at about 7 M&Ms/day.  For several days they have gotten nearly all their prize, and, at risk of diluting the results, I’m considering expanding the purview to all unkind acts, instead of just unkind words.

Of course, I’d really like them to understand that name-calling is bad because it tears the other person down, and they should aim to be kind to the people around them, build them up rather than belittle them.  But if parents don’t have much control over what their kids say, we have even less control over what they think.  Maybe the good habit will sink in to their core beliefs someday.

Conversation overheard in the in the back seat of the car:
Milo: “Did you know that William’s family chews bones and likes to smell smoke?” 
Ella:  “WELL, they’re not very fancy,” she pronounces, with scorn.  She goes on to explain: “It’s because their parents were poor, and didn’t have very much money.” 
I withhold comment, hoping for another juicy morsel.  Ah, the window into a child’s thoughts we get when we listen but don’t talk!

Alright, for those a little further from the characters, this might take an explanation.

The kids and I were invited over to Emma and Ian’s house for dinner one Sunday while Jeremiah was hunting, and they made marinated grilled chicken breast for “tea.”  They’re English, so “tea” is code for “dinner.”

Dumb American commentary:  “Tea” is dinner…except when it’s “afternoon tea,” which means snacks and a hot drink around 3 p.m.  Or “morning tea” which is also a snack and a hot drink, but (wait for it) in the morning.  A literal cup of tea is just that: “a Cup of Tea.”  Or, in NZ, a “cuppa.”

Ian had carefully pulled the succulent chicken meat off the bones, setting the serving plate on the table.

“I want a bone!” William, the youngest son, demands.

“I want a bone too!” says Amelia, their daughter.

“Excuse me?” Emma reprimands.

“May I have a bone please!” they chorus, obediently.

Ian passes one the gristly bone to William and another to Amelia.  The bone-heaped plate at his elbow must have been his personal stash, but a generous dad, he was willing to share.  They proceed to suck them clean.

I watch them with interest.  The thought of the greasy tendons rubbery in between my teeth makes me shudder, but they’re devouring them with relish.  Maybe this is why England once commanded an empire; their people aren’t wasteful like us Americans.

After dinner we all went over to the Halswell model trains.  Run by a club of “good old boys,” the ride-on scale models are enjoyed by drivers as much as the riders, and this evening the place was packed, noisy with train whistles and heavy with coal smoke from the genuine steam engines.

“Ummm,” signed Ian as he stands in line for a ride.  “I love that smell.”  Emma nods, appreciatively.

“The coal smoke?” I ask, choking.  I didn’t know what coal smoke smelled like until a year ago when we burned some at a DOC hut while tramping.  The term “acrid” comes to mind, certainly not savoury.

“Oh, yes!” they say.  “We used to have an open fireplace in our house; Emma’s house growing up had four.  We’d burn through a whole bin of coal in just a week.  Ummm!”

Well, perhaps to them it’s like us smelling wood smoke on the breeze on a crisp autumn evening.  The scent must conjure up images of cosiness and warmth…as warm and cozy as an English home gets in winter.  Brrr.

The next day at dinner I debriefed with Jeremiah: “Emma and Ian like to chew the bones!” I marvel.  “And they like the smell of coal smoke!”  We shake our heads.  Milo listens intently.

I few days later we had Milo’s friend Ella with us in the car; her family is also friends with Emma’s family.   That’s when I overheard the kiddy conversation in the back.

I laughed with Ella’s mom about the exchange.  “Fancy,” hum?  she said.  “We don’t even use that term.”  We brainstormed a bit, and concluded that Ella must be picking up her world view from her favorite princess movie.  It’s amusing to think what Milo’s picking up from his dinosaur documentaries….