Don't tell the Iranians

Iran's vice-president recently accused "colonists" of causing a drought in the country.

Iranian leaders do have a history of saying some crazy things, like that time one of them said the Talmud is behind the world drug trade. But in this case, I'm afraid Mr. Mousavi is right. Israel does have Iran's missing water. In fact, it's all been right here in my house.

Dani's been using it to wash dishes.

You see, despite Dani's affinity for trouble-making, she's really a good girl at heart. She wants to help. She wants to help no matter how many times we beg her to stop helping.

Lately she noticed that I needed help with the dishes. The drying rack was absolutely chock full of dishes, none of them as soapy and wet as clean dishes need to be. She took it upon herself to fix that. And soap up the dishes she does.

It's a wet process.

She has noticed that I haven't been as enthusiastic about her assistance as a truly loving mother would be. But she doesn't let my ingratitude stop her. She's still happy to help, even if it has to be behind my back, when I least expect it.

Of course, once one kid is in on the fun, they all have to be. A and N have mostly stayed off of D's dishes turf. They prefer taking the sponges and using them to wash their bedroom floor. They don't sweep first, because where's the fun in that?

On the positive side, I no longer miss the smell of wet earth after a warm summer rain. I enjoy that smell at least once a week.

And of course, after working hard cleaning the house, what better than a nice bath to unwind? So they continue to bathe themselves when possible. Usually in the bathtub, but by the time they're done, one could just as well bathe in the water on the floor.

Me, I've grown so used to screaming "TURN THE WATER OFF!!!" that I'm afraid I'm going to start shouting it any time I hear a sink running.

Come to think of it, I think we may have played a role in the drying of the Aral Sea, too. Don't tell Kazakhstan. 

Consider Yourself Warned - S - Safety (Part 1)

There's so much to say about children's safety.



OK, I lied. There's only one thing to say - there's no such thing as safety. NOTHING is safe in the hands of a child.

Toy manufacturers will try to convince you that their products are safe, but they lie like snakes (no morals, these toy makers, but what do you expect from the people who unleashed Singing Barney on the world?).

That said, while there's no "safe" and "unsafe," there is less dangerous and more dangerous. It's a spectrum, stretching from fuzzy teddy bears on the one end to arsenic-drenched knives that are somehow also on fire on the other.

Avoid the false comfort of the left side of that spectrum. If your child does not succeed in biting off part of the teddy bear and choking on it, they will learn from it to be unafraid of real bears, and will eventually attempt to confront one. Repeat after me: nothing is safe.

Here is a typical toy marketed to parents:

Plastic with no sharp edges, eye-burningly colorful, and "educational" because it has some numbers and letters on it or some such crap. This toy is so ridiculously safe that you couldn't hurt yourself on it if you tried. If a single child is hurt by this toy, there will be a mass recall of all 200,000 units ever sold.

Here's what that toy looks like in the hands of your three-year-old:

So when you have kids, go ahead and cover over any exposed wires and lock away your knives (especially if they're on fire). But don't expect not to be hearing *CRASH* *BANG* *WAAAAHHHHH* several dozen times a day anyway.

(Oh, and I lied about lying - there must be more to say about safety if this is only Part 1. Although really, the general idea remains the same throughout.)

Adi's been doing more art. This is her depiction of me today:

In case it's not clear, I'm packing and labeling boxes.

She didn't make me skinny this time (hey!) but it's still a very flattering picture, since I doubt I looked half that happy for most of the process.

Packing involves 1. organizing, 2. working according to a schedule, and 3. doing activity that is not sitting in front of the computer with a cup of coffee in one hand. It's everything I hate.

There's nothing like packing to inspire me to live a simpler lifestyle. Every time I get another box, there's a voice in my head saying, "screw it! Just throw in a few outfits, the kids' ten favorite books, and the computer and leave the rest behind. No wait! - leave the books, too, because if I have to read about Curious !@#$ George and his !*#$!# birthday party one more time... "

There is no other voice.

But I continue packing anyway, because the other things I'm supposed to be doing are no more appealing.

I leave you with another picture from Adi:

I have no idea what this is supposed to be. I just hope I'm not the one on the right.

BAPPAP. and Art.

D is definitely my most angelic-looking kid. She's got the blond hair and blue eyes and rosy cheeks and everything.

D herself recognizes this as misleading, and takes constant steps to make sure she's not giving the wrong impression. Mostly by disrobing, smearing her face with peanut butter, and never ever allowing her hair to stay in a ponytail for more than 10 seconds.

Recently, she's started taking offense when I call her a good girl.

It started a couple of weeks ago:
"D, you're such a good girl!" I told her.
She looked at me with suspicion. "No!"
"No, you're not a good girl?"
*shook head*
"So what are you then?"
"I'm two!"

That same conversation has basically repeated itself every time I slip up and tell her she's good. Except that instead of saying "I'm two," she says, "I'm BAPPAP!!" While I pride myself on my understanding of Toddler, I have yet to figure out what that one means.

******

Today D came running to me sobbing.

"Oh no, did you get hurt?" I asked.
She nodded, still crying.
"Did you run into something again?"
*shook head*
"What happened?"
"They... they HIT me!!" she managed to choke out.
"Who hit you, honey?" I asked.
*sob* "The chairs!"

******

Adi was extremely amused by the picture I put up last time to illustrate the gravity-defying properties of baby poop. Today she decided to make her own:

She also drew a picture of one of her adventures today:

The big one is the neighbors' oldest son. The little ones are her, N, and their two friends A and S. They are all being chased by a dog. They are about to make it into the house with the blue door and shut the door.

Dani was also there, but isn't in the picture because there wasn't room between the dog and the door for a sixth kid.

For the record, chances are good that "chased by a dog" means "there was a dog showing friendly interest." Adi is OK with snakes, lizards, bats, and cockroaches, but somehow labrador retrievers and similarly good-natured dogs are filed in her brain under "monsterous terror-beasts."

Consider Yourself Warned - C - Changing Diapers

Dear readers. It is almost one in the morning. But I am awake, and posting, so that you can get important baby-related warnings. I am truly selfless.

Feel free to show your gratitude in the form of cash presents.

Today's warning - babies are physics-defying wonders, and that makes changing their diapers really hard.

See, babies look like real people, just smaller. But it turns out they have a number of special qualities. One of these is that, in the first couple months of their lives, very few of the laws of science apply to them.

For instance, each of a newborn baby's eyes can basically roll in any direction, at any time, with no connection to what the other eye is doing. That might sound harmless enough. It doesn't look so harmless when you're a new parent to a brand-new shrieking infant with EYES ROLLING IN OPPOSITE DIRECTIONS.

If one wasn't prepared, one could, in theory, find oneself desperately wondering where a nice Jewish girl is supposed to go to get an exorcism done.

This same general idea extends to baby poop. Any individual poop molecule can go anywhere, regardless of where the other poop went or didn't go. You can pick up your adorable newborn, feel wet baby poop against your skin and realize that you're going to have to change yet another diaper blow-out, strip the baby of its poopy top layer of clothing, strip the baby of its poopy bottom layer of clothing, take off the diaper and - there's no poop in the diaper.

How the &#$% is there no poop in the diaper? What sorcery is this?

As your baby grows, it gradually must learn to obey the laws of nature like the rest of us.

But just as things are settling down, and the poop is staying in the diaper more and more frequently, you encounter a new craziness: your normal baby, during routine diaper changes, starts turning into Baby Escape Ninja.

You lay the baby down, remove its clothing, take off the diaper - and suddenly your child is transformed into some kind of superhero with a talent for writhing and a desperate, all-encompassing need to be anywhere else, RIGHT NOW. Even if that means falling head-first off the changing table.

Note: this will always happen at some point between starting to remove the dirty diaper, and successfully putting on a clean one. There is something about the feeling of fresh air on their tushies that makes babies think, "This would be an awesome time to practice every type of physical movement my body is capable of."

So be warned. Never, ever try to change a baby's diaper without one hand firmly on their ankle. The other hand, for the record, should be hovering over a pre-prepared pile of wet wipes, ready to grab one and start frantically wiping as soon as the child's body completes its next 360-degree rotation and the tushie comes back into view.

And take comfort. At least this problem falls into the category of "things your kid will hopefully eventually outgrow." More on that later.

Studying with Dani

It's been a few days. I had a final exam yesterday, and I spent the last few days almost studying.

The kids were sort of, mostly good about it. A and N spent their mornings playing Fairy Princess Ballerinas who are Also Mommies, or whatever it is they do.

I felt kind of bad about spending so much time doing math problems (it's not like they're used to me doing homework, I was worried that it would all be too new and different for them), so I at one point I stopped and offered to read to them. But they just rolled their eyes, because what book could have a better story than Fairy Princess Ballerina Mommy Sparkly Magic Sisters?

S was also mostly good. Or more, relished the chance to not be good. She got to crawl around getting filthy in whatever she wanted, and it often took me upwards of 20 seconds to realize that she was stuffing things into her mouth.

For babies, life is one big game of Quick, Shove it in Your Mouth.

It just occurred to me that Quick, Shove it in Your Mouth would be a gross but excellent board game.

Anyway. The problem was with D. (Is anyone surprised?)

D is very sweet. She is a very affectionate child. She likes to express her affection physically. Usually by climbing, but sometimes also through grabbing, or squashing.

Oh, and she's also often naked. I'm not even going to get into that one right now. Suffice to say, it's not worth the bother trying to get her dressed and keep her that way unless we're in public.

So my attempts to read usually looked something like this:

I didn't add speech to that. So for the record, when there's noise, the noise is usually "Mooommmmyyyyyy. Look. Mommy. Moooooommmmmyyy. Look!"

I read, she climbed up my back and back down my arm and swung from my legs and bounced on my stomach and tackled my feet. But as they say, it's all fun and games (and naked toddler backsides in your face) until someone gets hurt. "Someone" was usually me, getting a quick jab to what in a normal person would be stomach muscles, but in me is just internal organs, guarded by nothing but a layer of pasty flab. So there was also the occasional intense flash of pain.

It actually wasn't so bad. Something about knowing that I could be kicked in the gut at any moment helped me stay alert. I learned a lot in the last couple of days before the test, and I'm pretty sure I did well.

I'm not going to start a toddler rental business for students trying to cram anytime soon, though.

More Money Making

Here's another thing parents-to-be should be aware of: there's a direct correlation between how much kids love a TV show and how intensely, mind-torturingly irritating it is.

Kids LOVE the teletubbies.

Some day in the not-distant-enough future, the most popular kids' show will probably just be colors brightly flashing at random to the sound of nails scraping their way down a chalkboard. It's the direction we're heading.

Anyway. My kids love Dora the Explorer, which isn't usually too irritating. Dora's actually a pretty good role model for kids. She's got a normal kid's body, she's bilingual, and she gets things done without bugging her parents about it.

There's one annoying moment toward the end of every Dora show, though. "We had a great adventure today!" We, Dora? We had a great adventure?

What I did today: wash the dishes, scrub the counters, work a full shift at my dead-end job, cook, change dirty diapers, make futile attempts to make math stick in my brain.

What you did: earn more in a single 24-hour span than I will in an entire lifetime, despite being a fictional 8-year-old.

Don't even think of asking me which part of the adventure was my favorite.

But readers! You don't have to end up resentful that brightly-colored cartoon characters are out-earning you and rubbing it in to boot! You can steal one of my fantastic money-making ideas and be rich. Then you can hang out with Dora and the two of you can mock me together.

Which brings me to:

Awesome Money-Making Ideas, Part 2
My second awesome idea is deceptively simple - a cookbook with recipes for kids.

I know, you think it's been done before. But it hasn't been done like this.

But first, some background for my unchilded readers:
You see, dear readers, before you have children, you think of eating as something that humans naturally do to stay alive. We each have some foods we like more and some we like less, but really, food is food.

But to a child, there are two vastly different categories of food. The first, Good Food, includes things like marshmellows and hot dogs and apple juice and cookies - you know, real food that people really enjoy eating.

The second, Not Really Food, is full of things that your parents try to tell you are actual nutritious food items, but that are actually disgusting and unhealthy and all of the bad things ever.

Kids know something is Not Really Food if:
1. They don't like it the first time they try it.
2. Their parents seem even remotely enthusiastic about it.
3. Any friend or older sibling or TV show character ever indicates, even once, that it is "icky."

Astute readers may notice that the last criteria is likely to have a bigger impact as your family grows. All you need is for three kids to each decide that two foods are "icky" and there go about a third of your recipes. And if even one of them has a friend who's a picky eater, there go the rest.

I'm starting to think that's how people can afford groceries for 10 or 12 kids. At that point, they must all be living off of flour and water.

And now back to my winning idea:

A truly kid-friendly cookbook. This wouldn't be another "try baking spinach into brownies!" or "what if you fried the chicken? maybe then they'd eat it? PLEASE JUST EAT SOMETHING" cookbook. This would be a cookbook with recipes kids made themselves.

For example, my kids made a delicious cake the other day, with peanut butter, ketchup, and - actually I think that was it. There was definitely no spinach.

That could go in the book. Along with all kinds of other food combinations that no sane adult would ever have thought to try, but would be willing to chance for even a 5% chance of not hearing "It's iiiiiiicky, I told you I don't liiiiiiiiike this," at dinner.

Awesome Money-Making Ideas, Part 1

I've been having awesome ideas lately about how to make money on parenting-related goods and services. It's amazing the non-math-related things my brain comes up with when I'm supposed to be learning math.

Since I'm much better at the "come up with crazy idea" part than the "do any work ever" part, I'm putting my awesome ideas into the public domain. Feel free to take them.

Awesome Idea #1: Language School/Babysitting Service

One of the main problems when you're learning a new language is finding people to practice with. Even if there are thousands of people around you who speak the language you want to learn, there probably aren't very many who have any desire whatsoever to stand patiently for two minutes while you try to remember the word for "hello."

Enter the Babysitting Language School. Parents drop off their children, who are then used as free language tutoring labor.

Think about it - when you only know 50-300 words in your chosen language, who better to talk to than a toddler?

Beginners would be put with 2-3 year olds to practice important words and phrases like "no," "don't want," "more," and "NOOOOOOO!!!!!"

Once the students have mastered that, they can be placed with older children, to learn phrases like, "Is it time to go yet?" "Why do I have to clean up?" and of course "You never ask her to clean up! Only me. It's not fair."

Advanced learners would be placed with 4-year-old girls.

The best part is that you can take money from both the parents and the students.

Pee races

So here I just said nobody expects to do it all, and then I managed to do it all, in one day.

Just today I managed to work, study, spend quality time with the kids and even teach Adi some math, cook, do laundry, and clean the house. All in just 12 hours.

OK, so technically speaking I managed to work just enough to not get fired, study the material I was supposed to learn two weeks ago (just enough to convince myself I still have a shot at passing the final), read about Curious George and the Birthday Surprise for the 15 billionth time, and bribe Adi into working on math for 10 seconds in exchange for playing a "dress the princess" game on the computer (she didn't want to do any more adding after I told her that 29 + 1 is not 93, but she agreed to draw some halves and thirds for me).

"Cooking" meant dumping rice and beans into a pan and turning off the fire when I smelled something burning, laundry I really did, but cleaning I didn't actually do at all, I was just lying to make my list sound more impressive. (Also not done: de-flooding the kitchen floor, leaving the house.)

I am including a picture of me as the amazing Superwoman I was today, to help you better imagine it:

****************

I really did do one awesome thing recently: I invented Pee Races.

This is the latest trick to get a certain child of mine to use the potty. The problem is as follows: she knows how to use the toilet perfectly well, but she also knows that by using the toilet, she's doing just what Mommy wants. Which, as any toddler can tell you, is basically a form of voluntary slavery. 

This puts her in a difficult dilemma - does she go pee on the toilet, keeping herself clean at the price of her freedom? Or does she proudly, messily assert her independence?

Enter Pee Races. When using the potty is a race, she can use the potty and beat Mommy all at the same time.

The rules of Pee Race are simple:

1. To win, contestants must pee on the potty before Mommy can count to 5.

2. ONLY in the potty. On the floor doesn't count.

3. Please stop bringing Mommy your entries for confirmation. Mommy will go look herself. 

The decision isn't a simple one. I can see her struggling with herself. Is it a trick? It involves peeing in the potty, which Mommy wants... but on the other hand, Mommy does say, "Oh rats, you beat me!" so that makes it a real victory, right? 

So far, she's agreed to play, and we've both been winning. If this stops working, I'll really have to get creative. Red-Light-Pee-Light, maybe? Pee tag? There are a lot of possibilities, and I'm really hoping to never see any of them in action.

Having it all

(Warning: the following is a real rant, not a funny one)

Growing up with a successful career woman mother, who had successful career women friends and successful career women sisters, I always thought I could have it all.

Oh wait, no I didn’t. Because no actual career woman would make such a stupid promise.

I find myself baffled by Round 2,038 of online articles on whether women can Have It All. When did “have it all” become the standard to aspire to? What parents have been sitting down with their daughters and saying, “Little Susie, when you grow up, you can do every single thing you want in life, all at the same time?”

More importantly, what colleges have been training women for high-profile careers while completely failing to teach them there are not infinity hours in a day, meaning choices will need to be made?

And by the way, this is coming from someone whose monthly to-do lists include things like “learn Russian” and “write a book.” If I’m calling your expectations unrealistic, you’ve clearly crossed into the realm of the absurd.

If I were slightly more cynical, I might think the “women can’t have it all” crowd was deliberately misrepresenting feminism. Or maybe it’s not lack of cynicism, and more that I just can’t think what they would get out of doing that.

In an attempt to understand all this, I googled around to figure out who started the latest round of beating this particular dead horse. The “women can’t have it all” crowd are saying Sheryl Sandberg (COO of Facebook) argued that career women can have families, too. Which means she thinks we can have it all.

But when I googled Sandberg, all I found – beyond a Radio Islam article on how Jews control the internet – was a woman who says things like “there’s no such thing as work-life balance,” encourages women to leave work in time for dinner with the family, and suggests same-sex marriage when possible (really! Real quote: "The most important thing -- and I've said it a hundred times and I'll say it a hundred times -- if you marry a man, marry the right one," she said. "If you can marry a woman, that's better because the split between two women in the home is pretty even, the data shows." (Which goes to show the level of nerdiness we’re dealing with here – measuring the benefits of gay marriage in terms of statistical likelihood of shared housework, rather than, say, in terms of actual attraction to people of the same sex. I love it.))

I don’t see anything there suggesting that it’s easy to be a woman with both kids and a demanding career, or that both of those things can be done perfectly at the same time.

Maybe this is just one of those non-debate “debates” that has to spring up once every year or so even though nobody understands why. Like seasonal flus. Who knows who was first infected, or how so many people got it so quickly. It’s just a fact of winter.

Once a year, we must talk about whether or not women can Have It All, even though it’s been discussed to death, even though it’s a ridiculous premise that was never part of feminist ideology, even though real feminist philosophy in its various incarnations has far, far more interesting ideas to offer. It’s just a fact of slow news seasons in the days of 24/7 new networks.

Personally, my response will be a quiet thankfulness that my parents never suggested I could have everything, or even that I could have any one thing (“Little Susie, you can be anything you choose to be!”). Among my childhood memories is a conversation with my father when I was roughly 8 years old in which he explained that I couldn’t be a professional jockey, because jockeys are short (now why couldn’t I believe him so easily when he said there were no shape-shifting demons capable of mangling a human body in a single instant lurking in my closet?).

So thanks, mom and dad, for the realistic expectations.

As for you, internet, if we must have debates over things nobody said, can we at least have new ones? 

My children - a ranking

For whatever reason, I find myself mentally ranking my children in terms of their chances of success in organized crime. And being me, instead of ignoring the thought as obviously bizarre and disturbing, I decided to share.

But first - in case at some future date my kids have learned to read and are reading this: kids, you should know that after you go to bed, your father and I don't do boring grownup things like I said. We stay up late and eat candy and watch movies.

There, that should keep them fuming elsewhere.

Now to the rankings. (I should note that I'm only ranking their odds of success if they do choose this path, not their chances of choosing a life of crime.)

A:
Points in her favor: she is clever, and in particular, is good with numbers and has an impressive memory. That would come in handy when remembering which judges she's already bought off, and calculating how much she can afford to offer the rest.

She is used to giving orders, and was the first to come up with the idea of using someone else to do your dirty work ("D, go hit N for me, OK?").

Points against her: she badly wants to be a good girl, and tends to obey authority figures. Also, she can't look people in the face if she's done something wrong.

Total score: 5/10.

N:
Points in her favor: I can't really think of anything.

Points against her: everything about her.

Points in her favor on second thought: if she does turn to a life of crime, she'll have the enviable advantage of being the last person anyone would ever suspect.

Total score: 2/10.

D:
Points in her favor: Usually fearless. Bonus points: when she is afraid, it just makes her aggressive. This is a child who is afraid of dogs, and therefore, makes sure to yell at them before they get a chance to bark at her.

Does not take no for an answer. Does not see rules as "made to be broken" - simply does not perceive rules in the first place, as they are unworthy of notice.

Can lie with a straight face.

When she has spotted her target, she usually manages to quietly size up the situation, then wait until the moment is ripe to strike.

Has been able to beat her older siblings in a fight since the age of roughly 12 months (the secret - hit first, fight dirty).

Points against her: Does not seem to have any aims beyond obtaining raw oatmeal for immediate consumption. A mob boss is usually expected to have a bit more vision than that.

Is too volatile. Although she seems intelligent, if she doesn't learn self-control she could ruin a perfectly simple delivery by stopping to yell "Fooya cops" at police officers just for the heck of it.

Total score: 8/10

S:
Points in her favor: Is so cute that she could get away with pretty much anything. Can already use torture in the form of sleep deprivation.

Points against her: Unable to talk, walk, or lift anything weighing more than a quarter of a pound.

Total score: 2/10 but has definite potential for improvement.

Standards

Four years ago: "Sit nicely on your chair, and eat with your fork. Wait to be served."

Three years ago: "Sit on your chair, and eat with a utensil."

Two years ago: "Be on your chair. No feet on the table."

Last year: "Be on your chair."

Earlier today: "If you're going to sit naked on the table scooping rice from the serving dish with your fingers, you have to wash your hands first."

The training gap

A conversation with a friend this week gave me a chance to catch up on what's been going on with a mutual acquaintance I hadn't seen in a long time.

Here's what he's been up to: curing AIDS. Really. Unfortunately not quite there yet, but he and his team have made some very interesting progress, and their nanomedicine start-up is in among the front-runners for the Start-Up of the Year award.

It makes my own intellectual achievements over the course of the past five years or so (calculating the grocery budget, passing java, managing not to drool on myself in public) look rather unimpressive.

But then, I'm getting to a point in life where many of my friends' professional achievements make mind look less-than-impressive in comparison. That's not a bad thing - the world needs doctors and lawyers and computer programmers, and none of them are going to be me, so it's nice that someone else volunteered.

What's embarrassing isn't the difference in job titles (I work in what could optimistically be called the media; if I have a job title, it's "the one who goes on maternity leave all the time"). It's the training gap. Namely, the extreme difference in the time it would take my neighbor the doctor (for example) to learn my job and the amount of time it would take me to learn his.

Him doing my job:

Me doing his job:

That said, I have no regrets. I'm glad I spent the last few years helping small people become slightly larger people. And hey, I'm probably learning all sorts of valuable skills that could be used to, say, interact well with rude clients (as long as they don't spit up on you, it's not so bad, really). Or even work as a police negotiator ("Let the hostages go RIGHT NOW.... That's it, I'm going to count to three."). It's not curing AIDS, but it's a start.

Consider Yourself Warned - F - Fear

Being a parent changes the way you think about some things. Like the price of diapers (suddenly relevant) or the price of a drink at your favorite bar (suddenly not).

One of the things that changes is the way you look at childhood fears. Pre-kids, if you'd asked me about my childhood fears, I might have said something like, "Yeah, I was afraid of pretty much everything as a kid. It wasn't fun."

Now, after many experiences attempting to comfort children who are in the grips of terror due to things like dogs, the dark, shadows, flies (yes really), cats, etc, I would say, "Yeah, I was afraid of pretty much everything as a kid. It must have been terrible for my parents."

One would think that as someone formerly (OK, and occasionally currently) terrified of irrational things, I'd have some idea what to do with children who are terrified of irrational things. But nope.

Here's the one thing I can tell you based on personal experience: it doesn't help if you can't repress your own fears.

On a different note, the one thing a child will never fear is anything that might actually kill them. Moths? Terrifying. Bathtub full of water? A fun toy for day and night, best enjoyed in secret.

Evolution seems to have been asleep on the job for that one.