January 23, 2010

"Win"

I'm seriously suppressing my former middle school math teacher self right now to allow room for my mother of a two and a half year old insanity wisdom. One of me is losing this battle. Quickly. A few divulgements: (No, you wont find that word on dictionary.com but I'm going to self define as "things which you divulge" because there is a screaming 2 and a half year old across the hall and it's the only word my brain can come up with right now.)

~I despise the whiny voice. You know, the high pitched gut forced crackled up sound that adults toddlers make when they're still learning that they don't always win.
~It drives me nuts when I'm trying to get the point across that what a certain child is doing is simply not acceptable and such intentions are met with a smirky little sideways grin instead of the sweet understanding eyes of "I promise never to do it again mommy".
~I mastered "the look" my 2nd day of teaching math to 6th grade students YEARS ago and have been secretly looking forward to using this technique on my own children. Sick, I know, but there are only so many things a person can say they're truly good at and well "the look" is one of mine. And just to make it clear that everything is right and balanced with the universe, it turns out "the look" takes some tweaking when using on your own children and although I'm close to figuring out the code for the tweak I'm not 100% there yet which totally sucks.

So, despite the fact that we enjoyed an amazing meal together at our favorite Japanese restaurant last night complete with our star of the restaurant two and a half year old chopstick master (who also ate most of my black miso cod, stinker), and then went on to skip our way alongside the worlds best behaved razor scooting tot (yes I know the age recommendation on those things is 5 years, but we strapped a helmet on him and so far he's only bit the dust a few times and each time got up only to want to go faster, so...), and yes he woke us up this morning by sitting up in bed and shouting the words WE ALL LIVE IN A LELLOW SUBARINE which is about the only thing that could possibly put a smile on a tired momma's face at 6:30AM on a Saturday, DESPITE ALL THAT... he's currently in his room screaming through his 4th time out of the morning and dang-blastit (twitch twitch, snap snap) he WILL NOT WIN this one.

Well it's now 15 minutes later and we're juggling balls of Play-Doh in the living room and every few minutes or so another rendition of one of the Beatles mixes that seems to be constantly playing in his head finds it's way to his mouth and eventually his arms and legs and all of a sudden we're grooving to lellow subarine or the more you say goodbye I say hello. And I'm left with the puzzling question:

How could I have ever even questioned whether or not I was winning?

3 comments:

Amanda said...

I'm glad the screaming ended. It always does, although sometimes it doesn't feel like it...at least for me.

And, the teaching/parenting thing shares a lot of common ground, except-somewhere along the way your children become less afraid than your students.

I hate that grin/smile/laugh when I'm being serious, too.

Gamma! said...

So...how'd that bowling go for you? :)
All's well that ends well right? Have a fun Sunday - love you all, mom/gamma

Karen said...

My mommy realizations as the mom of a 2-year old and the step-mom of a tween and a teen - whenever you feel like you're winning, you're wrong. But you're doing a fantabulastic job with that awesome kid of yours, and all those parenting lows are just so you can experience the highs even more.

(But whiny voices stink. And should be outlawed. Or at least followed with a big glass of vino for the Mamas...)