Amnesia

One thing you forget as your children grow older is how excruciatingly long it takes to do anything with a little one. Once the youngest gets into all-day school and can undo their own seatbelt, you get amnesia about the way an errand that should take five minutes becomes an agonizing study in how much human patience can be tested without disappearing completely. They resist the car seat, get spaghetti legs in parking lots, dash away at the front of a long line so you lose your place trying to retrieve them, touch everything, and altogether refuse to make even the simplest tasks easier. It’s as if they have boundless energy, the ability to teleport, and wiles far beyond their years. And getting back into the parenting game at forty, ten years after thinking I was done, not only gave me plenty of time to get a foggy memory, it also gave me a decade to get more easily prone to exhaustion. The other day I made the mistake of ignoring my instincts and experience and took Scarlett with me to do a little running around. Boy, was I sorry. I could swear when I left the house she was an ordinary little girl but, by the first stop, she had morphed into a naughty, mischievous, trouble-making monkey. And I came home a stressed-out wreck. In Jane Belk Moncure’s One Tricky Monkey Up On Top, Melissa spends the entire book trying to corral one monkey. I know how she feels.

http://www.amazon.com/Tricky-Monkey-Magic-Castle-Readers/dp/1561893765

http://www.janebelkmoncure.com/fsrsbbhome.htm