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

Naughty Baby!

I say it a hundred times a day: some babies are naughty. I also say some babies are sad, some babies are tired, and some babies are mad. But mostly some babies are naughty. It is a tongue-in-cheek way of coping with the frustration of being responsible for a small human who throws fits when you stop them from doing all kinds of stuff they want to do but shouldn’t. And that’s a lot of stuff. Keilana destroyed all my Madonna cassettes one day by irretrievably tangling all that fragile tape. Connor went through a maddening stage of throwing everything--jewelry, toys, food, rocks--down the toilet. Just yesterday Scarlett finger-painted a tube of Desitin on the T.V. screen right after she dumped out all the DVDs and right before she broke six eggs on the kitchen floor. But the worst culprit was Addison. When Addie was a toddler, if you couldn’t see or hear her, the news was very, very bad. Her most frequent naughtiness was to smear an entire cube of butter in her hair several times a day. Every day. She shaved off her own eyebrows twice. She mixed purple Playdoh and apple juice to spread in my friend’s costume room. She squeezed a Costco-sized baby powder over the bathroom like snow. And unrolled every single roll of toilet paper ever made. Naughty baby. In Judy Schachner’s Skippyjon Jones in the Dog-House, Skippyjon is a sassy Siamese kitten who fantasizes he is an untamed Chihuahua crime fighter. Naughty kitty.

http://www.amazon.com/Skippyjon-Jones-Doghouse-Judy-Schachner/dp/0142407496


http://www.judithbyronschachner.com/bio.html