Porter: The Cute vs The Angry
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.
Barbershop
I managed to procrastinate Porter’s first haircut long enough for his mullet to reach it’s full Trans-Am-driving-Scorps-listening-leather-moccasin-boot-wearing maturity. And although his father would be ever so proud for this to be his lifetime achievement, I knew it was time. And can I say that men and haircuts? Are you kidding me? It is like nothing I have ever witnessed in my life. There is no complimentary beverage. There is no pile of Glamour Magazines. There are no shampoo basins, or endless wall of product. There is no long and convoluted description of that haircut you saw last week on that one show, where you want it, but longer, and blonde. Un-uh. No, you are asked a simple question: Boy’s haircut? As I glanced around this place with it’s wall-to-wall taxidermy museum, and webbed lawn chairs, and the man in the opposite chair having hair VACUUMED FROM HIS SHIRT, and the gigantic lettering that reads ‘Haircut: $12’, I realize that this is the anti-salon. This is like if you took a salon and tent-bombed it with testosterone. Then decorated it straight out of 1961. And left it that way. Forever.
Little surprise when Porter left there with his hair smelling like Old Spice and looking like Dennis the Menace.
(click photo to see full set)
Another weekend at the Walston Labor Camp
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:
And ended up with this:
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:
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.
Of Royalty and Reptiles
Halloween this year had a slightly different tone for many reasons, one of them being that this was the first year that my mother did not meticulously plan and execute Stella’s costume. Instead she listened to Stella’s adamant request for CINDERELLA WITH LADYBUGS! and promptly purchased a pre-fab Cinderella get-up, and a bunch of iron-on ladybug patches and appliqués. Patches and appliqués that never got actually applied because, well, because that was my part of the process, and do I look like I have time to sew? Thankfully the dress/crown set-up was enchanting enough that she pretty much forgot all about the ladybugs. It also probably helped that I hid them.
And so she wore it, and wore it and wore it. She wore it so much that by the time the actual day of Halloween came around the dress was covered in grass stains and dirt and chocolate milk. And because of it’s high quality, it was recommended that it not to be washed, but to be wiped clean. Let’s just say that there was no amount of wiping that was going to make this thing whole again. Thankfully, she was agreeable to wearing the cape I made for her for Christmas a couple of years back. It worked on two levels: one was that she wasn’t forced to wear a dorky turtle-neck under her glamorous princess gown, but it also covered up a better part of the stains. We did have to make a trade-off on the orange leggings, alas.
Porter’s costume ended up being off the shelf as well, which is actually a smart course of action for a kid who, of late, can rarely can be counted on to be cooperative. Getting him into any kind of costume at all was a dicey proposition. This is a kid who has made it clear that he, and he alone, will decide when it is appropriate to change his diaper, get him dressed, strap him into a carseat, sit in a high chair, or pretty much anything else that we may be so presumptuous to suggest might be in his best interest. You can see now how I could do nothing but smirk when I picked up Porter from day care today and was told that he sat at the big-kid table for lunch today because – and I quote: “He would have it no other way.” Such diplomacy, those folks. It would have been complete folly on our part to hang our expectations on any kind of costume that required extensive energy or financial resources. And so you can see how the 50%-off, one-piece, one-zipper dino-getup was exactly perfect.
As luck would have it, he was fairly cooperative, and even kept the hood on throughout both outings: the Boo at the Zoo day, and the regular rounds to the Arcata Plaza. You will note, however, that in each and every photo from Halloween night, he refused to ever let his regal feet touch thine mortal earth. Every time Steve would so much as lean his weight forward – even hinting that he was going to put him down, Porter would respond with his usual bellow of protest. As for the sucker, it was the only way we could keep him occupied enough not to dump the entire contents of his trick-or-treat bag – which he tried to do several times.
And now the yearly ritual of establishing the exponential rate of candy disappearance.
(click photo to see the full set)