Independence Day

The Country that two hundred thirty years ago declared its independence is not unlike The Kid.

Young. Bold. Rebellious. Sometimes reckless. And more than a little naïve.

This will be The Kid's third Independence Day. But it's the first where he's starting to declare his own independence. Sometimes that's a good thing; other times it's not.

Several weeks ago, for example, he liberated himself from disposable diapers. When your kid tells you that he's ready to free himself from Pampers, you, as a parent, take the news with an equal measure of thrill and dread.

The thrill is for two reasons. One comes from the knowledge that you've taken the worst that his little body can dish out and lived to tell about it. And the other comes from the knowledge that you will no longer be buying disposable diapers and flushing half your salary down the proverbial toilet.

The dread is that there are bound to be accidents. Like when you take him to your neighborhood drug store and he gets so excited over a Power Ranger action figure that he piddles in his pants. And on the store floor.

A few weeks later, he tells you that he's ready to sleep at night without that safety net that is the disposable diaper. And you're amazed that when he wakes up the next morning, his pajamas and bed are dry.

Then a few hours later he's at the grocery store and he tells Mommy that it's potty time and it isn't No. 1. Alarms go off in Mommy's head, knowing that this would be the first bowel movement in over twenty-four hours. Fearing an earth shaker, she frantically scoops him up and rushes him to the loo, where he calmly does his business, as if he's been doing it for years.

Yes, The Kid has come a long way. And in such a short time. But with his liberation often comes exasperation. You see, he also has his own way of doing things now.

Not surprisingly, his way and Mommy and Daddy's way often clash. This extends to his potty training. For example, if he's in the middle of something important, like a Playmobil jousting match between The Evil Knight and The Silver Knight, he doesn't want that to be interrupted. And if you have the nerve to suggest that he might actually need to go because he hasn't gone all morning, he will rebelliously bark back, "No!"

There are times, though, that The Kid is still a kid and is not quite ready to liberate himself from Mommy and Daddy. Mostly this is true with Mommy, to whom he still calls out for when things do not go his way. This we call the "I want my Mommy" whine, which Mommy deals with by indulging in her own brand of wine, called chardonnay.

Sometimes Daddy feels a little left out. Not that he'd want to trade places with Mommy. But it does sting a bit when The Kid runs every time to Mommy. It's a popularity vote that you always lose, no matter how hard you fight it. You're the Al Gore of Parenthood.

The Kid always seems to make up for it when you least expect it, though. Like late in the evening when Mommy's in the shower and Daddy and The Kid are watching "Mulan" and there's a scene where Mushu, the spirited little dragon with Eddie Murphy's voice, hugs Mulan and The Kid turns and embraces Daddy in the same manner and Daddy melts.

Young, bold, rebellious, sometimes reckless, and more than a little naïve.

Is it just me, or do those same descriptive terms still seem to be just as applicable to The Country today as they did in 1776?

And I imagine that, at least in my mind, they'll still seem just as applicable to The Kid ten, twenty, thirty years down the road. Because, to me, he'll still be The Kid.

A New Kid in Town

The Toddler has outgrown his name.

A toddler is, by definition, one who toddles. Toddle means to walk unsteadily – that funky Frankenstein walk that little creatures between the ages of one and three do.

The Toddler just turned three, and for the past year and a half, I've been writing about him. And when I've written about him, he's always been The Toddler.

They grow so fast. It seems like it was just yesterday that he was crawling. Then came those first steps. Then those first words. And all of a sudden, he's no longer a toddler. He's the kid that you once were.

On the eve of Father's Day, just two weeks after his third birthday, he wanted his toddler bed removed. He wanted it out of his room. If he was going to go to sleep, it wasn't going to be in a toddler bed. It was as if he knew that he wasn't a toddler any more. So Mommy and Daddy picked it up that night and took it out of the room. He slept on his mattress without the toddler bed frame.

The Toddler stopped toddling some time ago. Actually, he stopped walking. It wasn't that he couldn't walk. Thankfully, he has two fully functional lower extremities. He had learned, however, that there is an easier way of getting around than walking. All he had to do was hitch a ride on one of two buses: The Mommy Express or The Daddy Express.

"Up, Daddy," he cries.

I look down at this little creature with his outstretched arms and pleading eyes and tell him, "No. You can walk. You've got two legs, just like Daddy."

"No, want up," he rebels. I try to move but he's now attached to the bottom of my leg. "Up!"

With a sigh and a shake of my head, I scoop him up and he settles into the little monkey position in my arms.

"Go to video store, Daddy," he says, the tears now replaced with a smile.

The dust kicked up by The Toddler is still thick in the air. But the clock has struck three, and there's a new kid in town. He's just a little quicker on the draw than the cowboy he's replaced. We call him, simply, The Kid.

Bye Bye Binky

I don’t know exactly when it was that The Toddler’s pediatrician first started to prepare The Parents for pulling the plug. Probably it was around age one that he began to gently nudge them.

By doctor’s orders, the pacifier was to be used only to encourage sleep and to calm “stressful” situations. Of course The Parents’ definition of “stressful” was taken probably a little more liberally than the kind doctor intended and became pretty much any time that The Toddler wasn’t in daycare or putting food into his mouth.

As The Toddler began to verbalize, his pacifier became known simply as “Paci” and it became inseparably attached to “Burpcloth,” a raggedy-looking cloth diaper, to the extent that they conjoined and became one word, known affectionately in The Family’s house as “Paciburpcloth.”

It was, if memory serves correctly, at eighteen months and at two years, that The Pediatrician, after seeing Paci being used to mollify The Toddler during booster shot visits, admonished The Parents that they were to say bye-bye to binky by age three. The Parents of course properly assured The Pediatrician during each of these visits that they would start to wean The Toddler from Paci, because that’s what good parents do – they tell the doctor what he wants to hear.

What parents tell a pediatrician and what they do are rarely one and the same. And such was the case with these parents. Although they had the best intentions, it seemed that there was always some reason to delay pulling the plug. There would be vows to cut The Toddler off right after this trip or that trip which were neglected upon returning from this trip or that trip.

Time seems to accelerate when you don’t do something that you know that you’re supposed to do by that time. The Parents swore that The Toddler’s second birthday was just yesterday when all of a sudden the third anniversary of his birth is kicking them in the shins.

And then one day it’s the day before that third birthday and The Parents are breaking the news to The Toddler that on the day he will be showered with gifts and be permitted to eat all the sweets he can stomach, there will be a bittersweet ending because he will have to say good-bye to his dear friend Paci.

The Toddler has all day to digest this crushing news and later that evening, as he prepares for bed and his last night with Paci, he utters out of the side of his pacified mouth something that The Parents never thought they would hear: “I don’t want a birthday.” The meaning of course being that he was willing to give up everything – the presents, the cake, the candy, the ice cream – for Paci.

For much of the next day Paci was forgotten amidst all the joy and celebration that was The Toddler’s birthday. But after the house emptied and all the presents had been opened, The Toddler, nap-less and over-stimulated, had a predictable meltdown to end all meltdowns. If ever there was a time when Paci was needed, this was it. But The Parents held firm, putting up with two hours of whining and crying and kicking and screaming until Mommy negotiated a deal that she will forever live to regret. There would be no Paci but there would be cake and milk, which The Toddler took to like a tiger to raw meat.

Now a chocolate mess, Mommy swept The Toddler from the table and into the bathroom for a wipe down. That’s when Daddy heard from outside the bathroom that unmistakable sound – a burp but not an ordinary one. The bathroom, The Toddler and Mommy – all coated with fresh undigested chocolate cake and milk. The icing on the cake to what had become a bittersweet third birthday.

After his second bath of the evening and a lot of extra comforting, The Toddler finally conked out. And for the first time in his three years, he didn't need Paci.

Oh my! A disgraced knight am I

I was anticipating this day with an equal measure of thrill and doom.

The thrill because my words would be in print and read by thousands of parents in Chicagoland.

The doom because there would be a photo accompanying my words that would embarrass and subject me to ridicule by my peers.

Well, folks, that day has come. I haven't seen it in print yet but the electronic version of my essay, "Kids and grown-ups: Different as knight and day," is out there for the world to see, posted on ChicagoParent.com. As is the dreaded photo, which depicts my son and I engaged in a jousting match using cardboard tubes left over from wrapping paper as lances.

As I'd written before when I suggested the concept of a Writer Protection Program, it's a heavy price we as writers pay to see our words in print.

Now feel free to give this disgraced knight your best shots.

Or if you'd rather hold off your attacks until you've seen it in print, here is a complete list of places, by zip code, where you can pick up a copy of Chicago Parent Magazine for free. See if you can beat me to them.

Update on Wednesday, May 24, 2006 at 08:18PM by Randy Richardson

Oops! I gave some bad linkage in my initial post. That, I guess, is why you need to go back and check these things before telling everyone you know about them. The link to the essay should be fixed now. Sorry about that. I am a bad, bad knight.

Update on Thursday, May 25, 2006 at 04:07PM by Randy Richardson

My wife reports from daycare today that The Toddler was given the Hollywood treatment. He was 'signing' copies of the article.

Writing with kids

Writing with kids. It may not be perilous like running with scissors. But it's a much more formidable task.

I still haven't figured out how to do it. Stephen King has three children, all grown now but he somehow managed to write prodigiously all through the time that they were being raised. John Grisham? Two children. John Irving? Three children. How, I wonder, do they do it?

The Toddler has become both my greatest inspiration for writing as well as my biggest obstruction. Each year I tell myself it's got to get easier. But The Toddler is about to enter year No. 3 and I'm still not finding it any easier to make time for writing my next novel.

This evening I started pecking away on the keyboard around 8:30. I was in a bit of a groove. The muse was working. I was feeling good. Then, about fifteen minutes later, Mommy and The Toddler walk into the office. The Toddler wants Daddy to go potty with him and to put him to sleep.

We used to have this agreement worked out in our family wherein Mommy and Daddy took turns each night putting The Toddler to sleep. This gave the parental units every other night off. The Toddler, however, has found a way to breach this agreement. He now wants one of us to read and the other to put him to sleep, so he gets the best of both worlds while there's no rest for Mommy and Daddy.

So I lead The Toddler into the loo and he begins to sing our nighttime song, "Hush Little Baby." It's been our lullaby since the time he was old enough to be cradled in my arms, though he still stumbles on the lyrics. He makes a halfhearted attempt at going pee. "I did it," he says heroically.

"That was it?" I say.

"Uh-huh."

"Uh-huh." I lead him into the bedroom and he crawls into bed and I situate myself in my spot next to the bed and commence to rubbing his back while serenading him with "Hush Little Baby."

"Again", he demands after my first rendition.

Three encores later he has finally settled down so that I can stop singing and lay my body down on the floor. Another fifteen minutes pass before he is in full snooze mode.

I exit his room at 9:45 p.m. Mommy is crashed. The muse I had for my novel is gone, replaced with the inspiration The Toddler has given me to write all that you have just read.

It is now 10:30 and time for me to go to bed. Tomorrow perhaps I'll find time to write that next novel. There's always tomorrow.