The Pulley of Twins

Let me weave for you the story of my morning:


The twins wake up. Dulce wakes Natalina up, which means Dulce starts out in the good mood, Natalina the bad.

Knowing that a calm, helpful mood earns happy parents, Dulce capitalizes on this. She eats her breakfast without complaint, gives me hugs, and is generally chipper and easy going. Natalina cries about wanting to go back to bed (which is an option she could have taken), cries about eating breakfast, calls us all mean, and is generally ornery.

This goes on for an hour.

Then, Dulce finds a little plastic puppy she'd painted yesterday. The paint had somehow gotten messed up. She freaks out, throws herself on the ground (by the way, these instances are a lot rarer these days. Most of the time, my kids are actually human beings at this point. It's glorious.) Anyway, I send her to her room to calm down, where she continues to be inconsolable. I turn to Lilly.

Who has miraculously transformed from cranky, pissed-off child to happy-go-lucky, compliant girl. She even offers to take the mistake dog instead of Dulce and attempt to repaint it. (Unheard of). She cheerily got dressed and made her bed. Because Dulce was crying.

And when something happens and Natalina starts tantruming, the pulley will shift again.

In this way, I perpetually have one "good" kid, and one "bad" kid.

Which is better on the face of it than two tantruming kids, but underneath, not so much. It speaks to a larger issue with my twins. Their perpetual, frustrating, maddening competition with each other.

Every single thing they do is only to outshine the other. Every single thing that happens is an accolade for one and a slight for the other. They spend nearly all their mental energy thinking about their twin and whether she is in a better position than the first.

And there are no positions in our house. My husband and I make it clear we don't care about the she-said/she-said crap. We don't favor anyone or anything. We have no idea why it is like this. We work to fix it by repeating that they are different girls and that it is not a competition. To limited success.

Twins. I just don't know about them.

My Five Year Old Is NOT a "Strong Leader"

As I walked with my children to school an hour ago, in between paying exactly equal attention and lavishing exactly equal praise to my twins so that they would remain in a human-like mood at least until we got to the big doors, I readied myself for a talk I needed to have with one of the girls' teachers.

As anyone who knows us knows, my girls are scare-quote spirited. We'd been coming off a long stretch of normality, where the girls would play together nicely for hours, accept reality as it came their way, and just generally showed a maturity I knew was too good to last.

But this past week has been an abomination.

There are lots of reasons for this. 1) School is drawing to a close, so their schedules during the school day have been disrupted with activities they are unused to. 2) The dentist told them they needed to stop sucking their thumbs, which, until this point, had been a major source of comfort and security to them. And my kids? They've wills of steel. They stopped that day and have not put their thumbs in their mouths since. I, as an adult, cannot fathom this. I've been trying to stop biting my nails for 29 years. HOOOOOOOOW? They just did it. I don't even know. 3) They've been fighting off an illness, which always makes for a rough go of things.

But there is a new culprit in the mix, and one I'm just not ready to face (although I did and I will).

The influences of other kids at school.

Yesterday, one of my daughters tantrumed for a full three hours. Ninety minutes over a lollipop that she picked out and ninety minutes out of just general malaise. It may have been my hardest day as a parent yet.

When pressed, one particular little girl, Natalina's partner for the school play, and the girl she now sits next to (that was a change from the previous month), kept coming up. M eats blood. M doesn't listen to anyone. M doesn't like me. M says mean things all the time. M likes me now and invited me to the "popular girls club" (INSERT MOM RAGE). M never does what she's told. She doesn't have to. M squeezes her hand hard to hurt her during play practice. M thinks she's a tattle tale. M, M, M, M.

So, I suited up.

In my I-mean-business trench coat and my paper-plate necklace, I prepared my talk in my head to the teacher.

When I got there, though, the tone of the talk surprised me.

"Hi, Mrs. G, I'd like to ask you about M."

She nods, knowingly.

"Okay, good, so you know what I'm talking about. What's up with that?"

She took a moment. "We have lots of trouble with M. Has she said anything ugly to your child?"

"Well, kind of," I replied. "They're partners in the play and I know Lilly sits next to her now. We're having some behavior issues at home, and I know you had to send L to the office the other day for attitude. I was just wondering if you could move her back to sit next to G?"

She hesitated again. Now, this is a longterm substitute. Natalina's teacher had a baby, and left just a few months ago, if that.

Her old teacher knew that N has trouble finishing assignments, and needs a good example to follow. N picks up on cues really easily, so when paired with G for so long, she began finishing assignments and setting a good example for others.

N picks up on cues really easily.

So, when Mrs. G told me that Natalina was a "strong leader" and she needed to "keep a good kid at each table" and mine was "one of the good kids", while my heart filled with pride (and recognition...they used to do this to me in school, too), I knew it was all wrong.

My child is not a strong leader.

And that's okay. She will be. I have no doubt. But she's not there yet. The person the substitute thinks my child is, and who my child actually is are two different people.

Natalina picks up on cues really easily.

For now, because I was not expecting that response at all, I let it go. The teacher is going to monitor the situation more closely, and there are only two weeks left of school anyway.

But, in reality, this is only part one of the talk. I need to, now that I know what I'm dealing with, go back in there and get my kid what she needs.

This may well be the one time in my child's life where being thought of as a strong leader will be detrimental to her, but so be it.

My child is not yet a strong leader, and I will defend her malleability as she grows into one. So that one day, perhaps, yes, the teachers will make her the leader of the table of kids who have some trouble.

Today is not that day.

Today she is just learning how to overcome her own trouble.

This is a crossroads. An important one. These kinds of events could determine how my daughter deals with outside influences for the rest of her life. So, for now, I've instructed her to be nice to everyone, including M, but to know that she needs to do the right thing, always, and not follow along if she sees M behaving inappropriately. That whether or not M likes her bears no consequence on her life.

God, I hope it sticks.







 

Thinking about Thought Bubbles - The Genius of a Kid

My child went totally philosophically meta on my yesterday. I was sitting outside, thinking about dull, adult things, sipping on my mundane Gatorade, and she came out to see me. And out of nowhere, she asked me this question:

"Mom," she said, "I'm thinking about thinking bubbles."

Mmhmm, I murmured, not particularly paying attention.

"Does that mean I have a thinking bubble inside my thinking bubble?"

And the consciousness of consciousness required to make such a statement floored me. I swear, I just grinned at her like a dumb fool for a minute before I could think of a reply.

Then, of course, like the good mother I am, I posted her genius up on Facebook. I got a great meme reply from my friend Andy, who said:

"Yo dawg, I heard you liked thought bubbles so I put a bubble in your bubble so you can think while you think."

Which is hilarious, but draws a really good point out. Repetition and patterns of inside the inside are not new. We do it with mirrors, with photographs, with that "yo dawg" guy...why has no one ever done a thought bubble inside a thought bubble?

This is perfect Bugs Bunny material here. Back when the narrator was erasing him and stuff, it goes along those lines, don't you think? Or the Road Runner running through Wile E. Coyote's painting. It all connects. But no one has done it. (At least according to my Google search.)

The closest I could find was a philosophical cartoonist in England. He did this:

Courtesy Chris Madden at chrismadden.co.uk

And, really, it's not the same thing. This picture shows someone thinking about a man thinking. Even if it were the man himself, thinking about himself thinking, he's placed his own image in the picture (very adult, in my opinion). My child didn't think of herself thinking. She thought of thinking. My child did this:

Go ahead and do a search. No one has ever drawn that before (at least that they put on the Internet).

I know, it seems silly, really. Ridiculous, maybe. But it's not. The intensity of thought required to come up with an original idea is staggering.

At five years old, my kid, so far as I can see, came up with an original idea.

...which puts her one ahead of me.

I'm pretty amazed.

The take home message here being, listen to your kids. Yes, they talk a lot but they're usually reasoning through things, trying to grapple with their reality and how things fit into the world they see versus what they are told about that world. And that's an important step. Not just for kids. For everyone.



 

She Wants a Little Sister...Hah!

So, for the past few days, I have been having a raging argument about whether or not I'll have another baby. Not with my husband, but with one of my kids. She won't give it up, starting in the morning with, "can I tell you a secret? I really want a little sister," going through to after school when she involves other people, "Mrs. R, shouldn't I have a little sister?" and continuing all the way into nightfall when the tiredness overcomes her and she flops on the ground kicking and yelling, "I want a little sister! I want a little sister!"

Oh, the injustice. The unfairness of it all. I mean, clearly, from her actions above, she's ready to take on the role of mature older sister. She's not still a baby herself or anything.

I explain to her how much work it will be.

"I'll feed her!" she says. Then thinks. "But you have to change the diapers," she concedes.

I tell her it takes nine months, and that's after I get pregnant so it could take years.

This is devastating.

Can't I understand that she wants a baby sister, now? How about tomorrow? What if she's really, really good and doesn't cry for the rest of the day? Then can she have a baby sister tomorrow?

I am so cruel.

I tell her I don't want any more babies.

Unacceptable. Moms should have all the babies all the time. They shouldn't have a choice. She'd make a right little Republican, wouldn't she? (Oh, cheap zing, there. Let's move along.)

Finally, she goes to my husband for help.

First of all: Hahaha. Haha. Hahahahahahaha. HAHA. Yeah, right, kid. You'd have better luck getting a puppy from him. The chances of a puppy are at least .0000001.

He tells her no.

She tantrums because she's so ready and mature and can't we just see that? It's very convincing.

Finally, after she calms down, waits a while, and asks again, my husband smiles at me.

"Yes," he says.

And it stops.

And I'm thinking, why didn't I think of that?

But, fear not, it was only a slight reprieve. The next day, she was at it again, looking for her little sister. We went through all the same arguments.

Finally, finally, I decided to stop assuming I knew why she wanted another baby (cuddly, cute, something to help grow, etc.) and asked her.

"N has a big sister," she said.

"Well, yes, but N isn't a big sister," I replied. "There are all kinds of sisters."

"Yeah!" she said. "N isn't a big sister and she has to sit in the back seat like me. But her big sister gets to sit in the front seat. I want to sit in the front seat, mama. So, mama? Can I have a little sister?"

Because in Natalina's world, if big sisters sit in the front seat, then she needs to be a big sister, stat.

Clearly that is the easiest route to the front seat of the car.

Preschooler logic at its best.

Two is enough.




 

Moment of the Week - 129: Tumbling Is Hard!

Natalina hasn't practiced her gymnastics in a while. LOL.