My three year old looked up from her untouched dinner plate, her brown eyes hopeful. “Mommy! Tomorrow can we go to Christmas?”
Her older sister set her straight in a withering tone. “Christmas is not a place. It’s a holiday.”
My three year old pondered this information. Her face brightened again. “Mommy, tomorrow can we play in the sprinkler?”
This conversation repeats itself often at our house as The Dreariest February Ever drags on and on.
And the drearier outside, the more time everyone needs to spend inside. The more time inside, the more, well, this:
(Photo credit: My five year old. She likes to experiment.)
And further challenging my parenting skills this past week, the TV remote went MIA. Six days ago. Six days with no PBS Kids to fall back on when the going got tough. Yikes. I’ve looked everywhere, including inside our defunct wood-burning stove. It was last seen in the hands of this little girl:
Speaking of whom, this morning was the second that she has greeted me with a cheery “Poopy! Poopy!!”, standing stark naked in her crib, her PJ’s draped over her menagerie of stuffed animal sleeping buddies, and a diaper full of poop tossed onto the floor.
I’ll spare you a picture.
Lately I feel that I don’t have this household or these little ones quite under control. Or maybe I’ve just been forced to acknowledge the hard truth. There is no such thing as having control.
I can’t control the weather, no doubt about that. As much as I’d love to hasten the sunny days of sprinkler weather, for myself and for my little ones, I need to wait just like everyone else. And we can still go outside and have fun, often in unexpected ways, like “berry picking.” (They have been warned repeatedly that these berries are not for human consumption.)
And I don’t have control over my surroundings, sadly. As I told my husband, my work environment is not optimized for productivity. Things get lost, even important things sometimes. Things get pooped on. Things get buried under laundry avalanches. I do feel bad about that, but I’m not a perfect mom. Yet we still can get a space cleared for the girls to have a blast indoors with new-to-them toys, courtesy of my sister (a set of cute puppies) and my husband (a circa-1975 Little People Castle, still in mint condition!)
(Hubby, never again will I give you a hard time about being a “saver.”)
And, speaking of Number 2, I really can’t control when my adorable youngest starts to understand about Number 1 and Number 2, and acquires the dexterity to rip off her own diaper. Yet this new development has a bright, glowing, silver lining:
This past week, she even managed to go Number 1 in her new favorite spot! Now that’s enough to dispel even the worst case of February blues.
So even though I have no control, I have plenty of reasons to smile. Winter isn’t over, but I’m able to get these little ones outside. The house is a wreck, but with some help the girls can enjoy fun “new” toys. Potty training my seventeen month old will be messy, but she’s showing great promise.
Now we just need to find that TV remote.
