Category Archives: Tantrums

Giving spice to every day.

Speaking in tongues less these days…sort of.

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I am terribly tardy in reporting that Porter has – over the last month or two – begun talking. But only if you qualify talking as a semi-intelligible, mono-syllabic, finger-pointing bark delivered with all the delicateness of a drill-seargant. Cwy! (cry) Dwibe! (drive) Kickle! (tickle) are all games that fall under the “I Say Jump, You Say, How High?” category. Where the “I” is Porter and the “You” are the rest of us dim-witted creatures whose job it is to peel his grapes.

Last weekend, while Steve’s parents were here for a visit, they were each subjected to – literally – hours of sitting in the car while Porter flipped every switch and button he could find. This game of Dwibe! is not a new one, and we spend a great amount of energy to keep him out of eyeshot of either car – lest he decide he wants to spend the next 2 hours rearranging the glove-box. Last week, I naively let him go out into the front yard just as Steve was driving up. After enduring 15 minutes of The Angry we finally just put him in the car with the intention of keeping an eye on him while we went in and out of the house. And I guess this is the part of the story where I have to share that, the car was parked on the street in front of our house, and at some point we were both inside the house long enough for our neighbor to walk by and notice a toddler standing in the driver’s seat of an unattended car. Imagine our supreme delight at opening the door to see our sweet grandmotherly neighbor holding our child and looking at us like we were Britney Spears. Yeah, that good.

But you see, this is how we roll these days: Porter tells us what he wants, we acknowledge that we understand what he wants, then he unleashes The Angry when we don’t give him what he wants.

Porter: Standing in front of the open freezer 5 minutes before bedtime, “WAAAAAAKKKKKLLLLLLLE!”
Me: You want waffle?
Porter: Matter-of-factly, “yeah.”
Me: But Buddy, we are all done with dinner. Waffle tomorrow, okay?
Porter: “NOOOOOOOOOO! WAAAAAKKKKKKLLLLE! NONONO!”

And just like that, he is fully prone, face-down on the floor – just me, him and the unattainable bedtime waffles.

For the most part, his vocabulary is based around a set of commands, and so we have been trying very hard to expand it to include the more benign aspects of conversation. For example, we are spending quite a bit of time these days on colors – progress being measured in oddly triumphant milestones. No longer is everything being referred to as “Geen!”, but instead we are now working with the wildly displaced associations of all the colors.

Me: “Porter, what color is this?”
Porter: “Lelow”
Me: “No, blue.”
Me: “Porter, what color is this?”
Porter: “Geen”
Me: “No, Orange.”
Me: “Porter, what color is this?”
Porter: “Wedt”
Me: “No, purple.”
Me: “Porter, what color is this?”
Porter: “Back”
Me: “No, green.”
Me: “Porter, what color is this?”
Porter: “Lelow”
Me: “No, blue.”

Woo Hoo! 0 for 5. I should have asked him to go double or nothing.

I leave you with a photo of Porter in his favorite sweatshirt. This is a sweatshirt that came as part of a set I hastily bought at Ross, not realizing it had a big-rig emblazoned on the back, with the fanciful title of “Highway Haulin”. Once I realized what I had done, I figured I’d just donate the sweatshirt and keep the jeans. Little did I know that this would singularly become the most requested item in his entire wardrobe. He INSISTS on wearing this thing every single day. I have gotten over my embarrassment of sending him to school in his new redneck-inspired ensembles, and have instead decided to embrace our hillbilly roots. I think I lost my right to engage in any elitist behavior right about the time my neighbor felt the need to rescue our child left unattended in a car in front of our house.

porter

porter

Quality Family Time

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One of those days right around Christmas, Steve decided it would be a good idea to engage both of our children in the task of making bread. Yes, really. He has been doing this more and more lately – suggesting activities out loud, in front of the kids that he knows have a success rate hovering somewhere in the single digits. And when I say ‘success’ I don’t mean that the project reaches full completion, but that any of it gets completed without one or both children or parents experiencing complete emotional breakdown. He did it again this week, when he suggested that we do finger painting. Indoors. With both children. He might as well have just opened the knife drawer and told them to go for it. I also find it quite odd that it is he – the one with the irrational fear of messes – who suggests these activities. I can only imagine that it is akin to throwing someone out of a plane to cure their fear of heights.

After suggesting the whole finger painting fiasco activity, I told him it would require that I had a cocktail in my hand. That day, happy hour began at 3:00pm. Steve was mopping the floor within the first 15 minutes. He was rocking in the corner within 30.

The bread making digressed not so much because of the floury mess that was created, but rather due to the volatile nature of the participants. If you lean in close, you can hear the anguished cries of Porter’s protest from pretty much the first moment he joins in the process.

stella and porter
(click photo to see the entire set)

Porter: The Cute vs The Angry

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Hey McGoo,

Big surprise, but I managed to miss my arbitrarily set, semi-regular post wherein I tell you how adorably cute you are and relate my amazement at how you can elevate angry to a level not commonly found in nature. Otherwise known as The Cute and The Angry, respectively. So instead of me telling you about The Cute and The Angry at 18 months, I will be doing it at 20 months. And later, when you are relating to your therapist how you can only find your happy place by hiding under your desk at work, you’ll think back to this moment and know why.

In our household, your 18-month birthday meant one thing: cheaper child care. Meaning that, instead of going obscenely over-budget every month, now we can just go grossly over-budget. Although the day-spa we send you to really does a very nice job of fanning you with palm fronds and catering to your infinitely short fuse, I still find it somewhat depressing that our monthly child-care costs rival the GDP of a medium-sized country. I guess this is nature’s way of preparing us for the high-priced, private college tuition you will be draining from our account in about 16 and a half years.

Aside from becoming less expensive, you actually have been showing us signs that maybe, perhaps, OH GOD PLEASE, your actual communication skills might be developing enough to begin diffusing The Angry. Don’t get me wrong, there is so much more to you than The Angry. But buddy, I hate to be the one to break this to you, but the reality is that you have gotten quite a reputation for using tantrum-theory as your go-to method for conflict resolution. Generally speaking, The Angry results from one of the following two scenarios: 1) You don’t get what you want, 2) No one will make the air stop touching you. Both are equally explosive, and both take a significant amount of diversionary tactics and bribery to diffuse.

Let’s take for example yesterday, when I had to endure an endless barrage of The Angry because I would not give you some of my coffee, and in an attempt at reconciliation, offered you some trailmix instead, only to be yelled at all over again because I wouldn’t let you carry the entire bag around the house with you. This is my life. My life where I do things like cut the crust off sandwiches and bribe you with candy. The kinds of things that, in another life, I would have judged with all the harshness of a person who hadn’t had her will broken by a toddler. Wait, make that a toddler and his smarter-than-her-own-good older sister.

Because of your intense desire to do EXACTLY what your sister does, we have had the volume of our lives cranked up to 15. On a dial that only goes to 10. The simplest of issues – without fail – digress with a true grace and elegance. Which is none. We have pretty much given up trying to make you drink from a cup with a lid. It usually works fine for a little while, but eventually you are guaranteed to get distracted or lazy and eventually drench yourself and your surrounding area with milk, or juice, or whatever other consumable you have convinced us to give you. You won’t sit in a booster seat, high chair or any other appropriate height accommodation unit. Instead, you stand. You stand in the bathtub, you stand at the kitchen bar, you stand at the dining room table. Little did I know that when I requested your father construct us a dining room table with benches, I was, personally, sealing my own fate. Dinner in our household consists of all four of us sitting on one side of the table with you pacing up and down the length of the bench, stepping over and on us whenever you decide you want to pick off someone else’s plate. And, usually you are doing it all shirtless because I can’t get you to wear a bib, and it is easier to clean spaghetti sauce off skin than it is to clean it off a beige polo shirt.

But no matter how much of The Angry you unleash, I can now say the following words: We, as a household, are sleeping. All night. Almost every night. It is a beautiful thing. I am sorry there hasn’t been more fanfare, more ticker-tape, more tequila-themed celebratory dinners, but it is one of those things you don’t want to say out loud, lest you permanently jinx it forever. And this Coke machine, it rocked. Sleeeeeep. No Sleep. Sleeeeep, No Sleep. Then, there was a week, and another, where I would dare to go to bed at the scandalously late hour of, say, TEN O’CLOCK gambling that you wouldn’t be up 3 more times throughout the night.

And it gets better. Better than sleep, you say? Oh yes, better. In the last month or so you have begun communicating with real, live actual words. The kind that the rest of us use. The sweet beautfil words that will form the bridge between The Angry and The Cute. And more and more come every day. Enough, that I have a blindingly optimistic hope that The Cute will become the over-riding theme for all posts to come. And rainbows and unicorns will be the new theme of this site. And all my words both in print and in real life will be shades of pink and purple. And the glorious harmony will reign supreme! Ahem.

To any outsider, it may not seem much. The gist of our conversations with you consist of you saying something that we can vaguely understand, us repeating back what we think you want, with you giving us an affirmative “Yeahuh” or the usual “NOOOOOOOOOO!” For example, last night at dinner there was this exchange:

You (screaming): “NOOOOOOOOOO!”
Your father: “Porter, would you like more milk?”
You (screaming subsiding): “Yeahuh”
Your father: “In this cup?”
You (calmly replying): “Yeahuh”
Your father: “Are you going to spill this one too?”
You: “Yeahuh”

See? Not much. But to know where we are coming from, it is like witty repartee amongst friends. You are at a place now where we can get you to attempt a repeat of just about any word we ask, and I have even gotten you saying “yeesssssh” instead of “Yeahuh” to everything. It is such clear and tangible progress, and something that is helping me on those days when I worry that instead of making the “Bring on the Cute” t-shirts, I will be needing to commission a “Save me from The Angry” tattoo.

I took a couple of video clips showcasing some of your cooler tricks of late, because really, with you, it is all about The Cute.

Anatomy Lesson

Zoology Practical

Another weekend at the Walston Labor Camp

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This weekend we removed and disposed of 3,380 pounds of green waste.

To clarify: the “we” being Steve, myself and the latest round of suckers visitors, Steve’s parents. Consider yourself warned: if you come to our house with the intention of “helping” you will be automatically issued a project, a Walstonling and your very own bottle of ibuprofen. Come to think of it, our house has become much like that of the Hotel California: You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.

You see, in our day to day lives we are deprived of any sort of productive activity that doesn’t involve the counseling or redirection of two emotionally volatile children. So you can understand how it is that we lose our ability to think rationally when it comes to getting to focus on actual task oriented activities. Activities that can be accomplished without having to stop every 5 minutes to keep someone from, say, drawing on an inappropriate person or thing with a Sharpie pen, or hauling the contents of the sand table into the kitchen.

The name of the game this weekend was berry abatement. As in, gone. Period.

We started with this:

house

house

And ended up with this:

house

house

As a matter of course, we all also ended up looking like this – basically, like we have been in a scratch fight with a badger:

steve

Not only were our guests kind enough to deal with the daily toil of yardwork, but they were also here to experience the magic and wonderment that is time-change-sleep-transition. I can say with some certainty that the idiot who came up with time changes DID NOT HAVE CHILDREN. This household already gets up at dark-thirty. Now, thanks to the lame time change, we get up an hour BEFORE dark-thirty. So not only did Bill and Judy get to give up a perfectly good weekend wrenching their backs and pulling their muscles and being ordered around by Porter the Angry Dictator, but they got to have the equivalent of the WWE in their bed by 5:00 a.m.

As I have been reflecting on all the work-vacations people have been providing lately, I think I have realized that we are missing the bigger picture here. One of my former professors from school started a B&B where people come to get the “farm experience”. As if. I remember thinking it was the most ridiculous idea in the world. What crack-smoking maniac would pay to go on vacation and actually pay to work? Oh. Well. I think I have just answered my own question.