JULIE•PERRAULT

Posts Tagged ‘Twins’

Seven Habits of Highly Effective Babysitters

In Family, Kids, Parenting, Twins on August 8, 2009 at 11:25 AM

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Dear Babysitter,

In exchange for a substantial cash payment, here’s what I expect but may not actually say:

1. Be on time. You can’t imagine the intricate coordination it has taken for me to leave the house. Everything is timed with military precision and I am READY to go. I thought the same thing when I was your age and then I learned — a few minutes IS a big deal. If I miss my way-passed-due highlight, there will be hell to pay.

2. If you are going to be late, call or text me. Otherwise, I’m staring out the window panicking that you will no-show. No-call, No-show and like Tony Soprano says, you are dead to me.

3. Refrain from texting while I’m talking to you. Seriously, I’m entrusting you with a generation of my family, I’d like to think that you are paying attention.

4. Play with my kids. Don’t plant them in front of the TV so you can sit on the phone or computer. They get enough of that from me.

5. Keep the house clean. If my house is usually clean when you arrive, that’s because I REALLY like it that way. Plus, that’s the last thing I see before I pay you.

6. Tell me the truth. If you need to leave at an exact time to meet your friends to go out, tell me and I’ll be on time (and if I’m late, I’ll call). If one of the twinfants sky dives out of his high chair, let me know that you forgot to buckle him. It happens to the best of us. I’d rather hear it from you than my four year old.

7. Love my kids. And I will love you. One day, I’ll help you find a “real” job and a husband. And if neither work out, I’ll always take you back.

Love,

The Mildly-neurotic Mom

The Devil Wears Pull-ups

In Family, Kids on July 30, 2009 at 4:34 PM

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It’s odd. There are some things about parenting that aren’t nearly as difficult as I anticipated. Waking up early, changing diapers, even the occasional cleaning of vomit is not so bad.

And then there’s potty training.

The equivalent of water boarding for most moms, potty training is one week of intense torture followed by months of sporadic episodes. After the initial month, my daughter was potty proficient. With my son, I was not so lucky. Five months later, we still burn two Pull-ups a day.

At one point, we were really close to ending our diaper dependence. (Yes, a Pull-up is a glorified diaper repositioned by marketers who have convinced us not to go cold turkey.) But then came the day that I forgot to put a Pull-up on him for his nap. He woke up from his nap with blood-curdling screams.

Him: “CALL MYRA! CALL MYRA!” (Myra cleans our house)

Me: “What’s wrong?”

Him: “My bed’s wet! Myra needs to change my sheets!”

Me: “Mommy knows how to change sheets.” (I’ll address the fact that my children don’t think I’m capable of basic home maintenance in a future post.)

Him: “No you don’t…call Myra.”

I digress. The point of this was that when I asked him what happened, he told me that he thought he had a Pull-up on. Translation: He thought about it and decided to pee on himself. The bottom line is that I don’t think he needs them anymore, he’s just a bit lazy. A few mornings ago, he crawled into my bed. I asked him if he needed to potty.

Him: “No, I just did it in my Pull-up”

Me: “Why’d you do that? You should go on the potty.”

Him: “Dats okay. I wike to go in my Pull-up, it’s warm.”

Me: “Nice.”

I can only imagine the thrill of potty training the twins.

Relativity

In Family, Kids on June 1, 2009 at 12:29 AM

“I don’t know how you do it with four kids.”

I hear that a lot.

“I can barely survive with two.”

My response is usually the same,

“I thought two was hard, too. You get used to it.”

Two, Two, Many.

I can distinctly remember a conversation a few years ago with a friend who (now) has seven kids. At the time she had six and we had (only) two. We were discussing how many kids we would like to have one day and she said, “If we only had four, we would have it so easy.”

I was baffled. How could doubling what we have, be easy when half of that was already hard? But then the twinfants came along and in some ways in got easier. Or maybe I just expected the difficulty to exponentially increase and it didn’t. Don’t get me wrong, there are many times that I think that four kids is four too many. But most times it is a perfectly balanced number.

While putting it into a mathematical equation may be difficult (for me at least). The concept is simple, it’s relative.

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