The Twinkies

Spit out the cat-food, please.

I survived the Mommy Wars over breastfeeding, managing to be both a fraud who supplemented and a freak who is nursing toddler twins. There aren’t many areas in life I’ve achieved both fraudhood and freakdom. I survived the working vs. stay-at-home debates utilizing the aggressively nutty choice of trying to start my own business in a totally new field for me. But the educational arms race may do me in.

When I was interviewing to teach at private schools one administrator warned me that parents, upon enrolling their child in that particular school’s kindergarten, sometimes asked if this would increase their child’s chance of getting into Yale. Seriously. I attended a workshop on brain development at my kids’ school because I am the kind of dork who finds child development interesting and several parents asked questions that boiled down to “tell me that spending all this money on tuition will make my kid smarter/more successful/more likely to get into Yale.”

Everyone thinks her kids are gifted. Spend time on parenting boards and almost every single child seems to be ahead of the curve. Women whose kids are well within the bounds of normal developmental milestones get worked into a tizzy because someone else’s kid is counting to ten in three languages by one. Everyone has to be gifted. If your kid isn’t gifted he must be plain old dumb because those appear to be the only choices. You have to have a gifted kid who is super duper smart, so smart he makes you worried in that braggy kind of “whatever am I going to do - junior is playing Mozart again” way or you may as well give up. Not reading Tolstoy at 2? You’re doomed to a life digging ditches in Albania.

How do you determine giftedness at 1.5 anyway? Who smears paste in her hair with the most grace? Who eats, or doesn’t eat, the fingerpaints?

We’re in an educational arms race towards a time when all children are gifted and we are already scurrying about like madwomen trying to grab onto whatever advantage we can scrape up to get our kids into the very bestest colleges no matter what. It’s insane. And you have to consciously fight to not get sucked into it. Flashcards, DVDs, they are out there, taunting you with the possibility that if you just used this product your kid might be counting in Urdu too.

Mine of course, already does. Or maybe it’s Gaelic. It’s hard to tell what with all the fingerpaints in her mouth.

…go look at my photo of this adorable 5-day-old baby boy. I love newborns. I didn’t like babies until I had kids and now I am a baby addict.

It was after bath. There were twins running around, naked. I looked at one; the other pooped on the rug. It happened in a turn of the head with no warning. I cleaned up the poop and thought “He just pooped so we are safe with him for a while; I’ll diaper the girl first since she is now a greater poop risk.”

It’s a good thing I don’t work as an actuary. While I was diapering her he squatted next to me, looked at me, and pooped again. On the rug. Then he stepped in it and tracked it all over the rug.

I thought “He just pooped so we are safe with him for a while. I can clean this up before I diaper him.” I am a slow learner. While I was cleaning that up, guess what he did. Come on. Guess.

You’re close. He pooped, but it wasn’t on the rug this time. It was on the hardwood floor. The rug is now rolled up and in the closet until we rent a steam cleaner. Potty training is so much fun.