by Mike Spohr
LATE TODDLER
In the late stages of toddlerhood your child will at last be able to speak clearly. This will be a welcome change at first, but only until you realize your toddler is using this newfound ability to embarrass you as often as he possibly can. Whether he does this innocently or through deliberate action (recent studies ominously suggest the latter), you must remain vigilant.
The ways your suddenly intelligible toddler can embarrass you are many and varied. If you have a touch of diarrhea in the morning, he will likely spend the rest of the day telling everyone you come into contact with about it in great detail. If you pass a man with an eye patch, he might holler, “Look, everyone! It’s a pirate!” Forget to pack a snack for him at the park, and he will loudly make a show of “starving” to everyone within earshot (never mind that he ate six pancakes at breakfast less than an hour earlier). Thankfully, there are some strategies you can employ to lessen your chances of suffering this kind of toddler-inflicted embarrassment.
First, take care not to say or do anything in front of your toddler that you wouldn’t be okay with him repeating in public. This can be difficult, but it’s of the utmost importance. Let one “douchebag” slip while stuck in traffic, and a few days later your toddler will be yelling “douchebag” over and over in the supermarket.
Second, you can master the art of deftly interrupting your toddler. While this may be rude, it’s nonetheless one of a parent’s strongest weapons against embarrassment, especially when used in conjunction with distraction:
Your toddler: “My mommy was on the phone talking to the bank this morning when she got really mad and said—”
You: “Look! It’s Anna and Elsa right over there!”
Your toddler: “What?”
You: “Yes, with Olaf! He’s got that little cloud over his head and everything. Over there by the tree. Go check it out!”
Lastly, in extremely high-risk situations you can give your toddler a lollipop. This will quiet him for a few minutes, but you should know that every minute of silence the lollipop gives you will be paid back later with five times as many minutes of sugar-induced toddler craziness.
Late-stage toddlers can also embarrass you by not talking. This most often happens immediately after you’ve bragged to a friend or family member about how well spoken your toddler is. When this happens you can either laugh awkwardly and change the subject, or ask your toddler about one of their interests like My Little Pony. Choose wisely, though, because forcing your guests to listen to a ten-minute treatise on why Pinkie Pie is the best pony may very well be an alternative worse than silence.
RECORDED TODDLER DYSFUNCTION THROUGHOUT HISTORY
On March 4, 1861, twenty-five thousand people gathered on the east front of the Capitol to watch Abraham Lincoln deliver his first inaugural address. Many of those witnesses wrote accounts of the day that have passed into historical record. One account, however, is historically significant for reasons that go beyond Lincoln:
“My wife, Matilda, and our two grown sons, Mathias and Allaster, traveled for many days by carriage to see Lincoln (our fellow Illinoisan) take possession of the highest office in the land. It was a long and uncomfortable journey, but what pride we felt in our breasts upon taking our spot! Sadly, this glorious occasion was ruined not by a Southern assassin (as many feared), but a child of two or three who began to cry ten paces to our right. As the child’s shrill wails grew, Lincoln became impossible to hear no matter how much I leaned forward. The mother tried to quiet the child and succeeded to a degree, but then he began to whine, ‘I’m bored,’ ‘I want to go home,’ ‘I’m hungry,’ and ‘I need to go to the outhouse.’ He repeated these demands again and again until Lincoln finished his remarks and I realized I’d heard precious little of what he had to say. Why anyone would bring a child of that age to an event like this, I do not know.”
CONVERSATIONS WITH YOUR TODDLER
Have you ever been at a party where you got stuck talking to an excruciatingly boring guest? If so, you have a good idea of what it will be like trying to converse with your toddler. Now before you take offense, you should know this is not a knock on your toddler. Toddlers are new to talking, and can’t be expected to understand the many intricacies of conversation that have taken the rest of us decades to master. With that said, toddlers are flat-out terrible at conversing. Unfortunately, while it’s permissible to tune out a boring party guest, you can’t tune out your toddler because it’s your job to help him develop his speaking skills. In order to remain engaged when your toddler opens his mouth, you will need to understand the many ways he will try your patience:
He will be hard to understand. While you will understand your toddler better than anyone else, there will still be times when you have to concentrate with all your might to get even the gist of what he’s saying, especially when he starts using two- and three-syllable words.
He will be a low talker. Just like Kramer’s one-time girlfriend on Seinfeld, your toddler will often seem incapable of saying anything at a discernible volume. Never mind that when he’s not low talking he will be singing, laughing, and shrieking at a volume that could break glass.
He will talk about boring things. Your toddler will love to talk about things like why green is the best color, what the dog he saw at the park looked like, and why you should let him eat ice cream. At no time will he ever dish with you about what he thinks will happen next on your favorite TV show or bring you juicy gossip about anyone over the age of five.
He will take seemingly interminable pauses. If there’s anything worse than listening to a treatise on why green is the best color, it’s listening to that treatise being interrupted every few seconds by an extended pause.
He will abruptly change the subject. When you’re finally getting into your toddler’s explanation of why he doesn’t want to wear clothes anymore, he will switch directions and start jawing about what happened on that day’s episode of Mickey Mouse Clubhouse.
The good news is that there are things you can do to improve your chances of not zoning out on your toddler. One way is to pretend you’re on the TV show Survivor, taking the “immunity challenge” to understand your toddler. As your kid babbles on and on, tell yourself, “You don’t want to get voted off the island, do you? Focus!” or “If we win, that’s a million bucks! Get your head into the game!” If that doesn’t work, think about how many more of these conversations you will have to have with your toddler if you don’t help him to learn how to converse better. As far as incentive goes, that’s a pretty strong one.
HOW NOT TO BE “PLAYED”
Your toddler may be younger than half the clothes in your closet, marginally intelligible, and still wearing diapers, but don’t let that fool you—he will outsmart you if you’re not careful.
The first thing you should know is that your toddler will learn the language of manipulation long before any other language. This means he will often try to get his way by exploiting his cuteness. He will bat his eyes, cock his head, and hug you while saying, “I wuv you” over and over. It’s all too easy to zone out only to discover later that you handed over your smartphone, sixty bucks, and all of the candy you have in the house.
The most common method of manipulation your toddler will use will involve throwing a tantrum. Alarmingly, toddlers seem to know to do this when they have the most leverage… in public. When your toddler is kicking and screaming “Candy!” in front of dozens of people, it’s tempting to just give him the candy, but that is a solution that will come back to bite you later because once he learns this method works he will use it again and again.
Instead of giving in, teach him that tantrums don’t work by removing him from the area. Want to really teach him not to throw tantrums in public? Try returning to your car, strapping him into his car seat, and then slowly eating the candy he wanted. Most parents won’t have enough ice water in their veins to do this, but it will seem more and more reasonable the longer you fight these toddler wars.
It’s also important to understand that no matter how obvious it may be that your toddler has done wrong, he will always plead total innocence. You could find him face down in a giant chocolate cake and he will deny so much as going near it. Because of this, you should generally be skeptical of everything he says. Maintaining a healthy dose of skepticism is smart even when your toddler isn’t actively trying to pull one over on you. Toddlers have trouble separating fantasy from reality, and are apt to wake you from a nap by saying, “There’s a man in the backyard!” If you’re not skeptical you might flip out and call the police, which could lead to you having to utter: “I’m so sorry, officer. My toddler now says he saw, uh, Spiderman.”
CHAPTER 3
FEEDING YOUR TODDLER
By the time you reach adulthood, eating has likely become one of the great, uncomplicated joys of your life. You’ve developed a palate for a variety of foods, including vegetables (and not just onion rings). You probably still enjoy sweets, but can stop eating them before they make you sick. And surely you can eat a meal without staining your clothes so badly they have to be thrown out. Yup, things are pretty good for you when it comes to food.
Toddlers, on the other hand, have a very complicated relationship with food. In fact, toddlers are pretty much all drama, all the time when it comes to eating. This means that as the parent of a toddler, your life will be all drama, all the time as well. So, unless you want to get fed up with getting your toddler fed, let’s strategize. Bon appétit!
EMBRACING THE MESS
Embracing the messy eating habits of your toddler might be one of the hardest challenges you’ll face as a parent. While you don’t have to like it, you do have to accept that it’s part of the learning process. Toddlers lack the coordination and attention required to keep from looking like they got into a fight with their food and lost, but they do get there eventually.
In the meantime, you have to be ready for the mess. There will be mashed potatoes dropped onto the floor, chicken nuggets hurled across the room, and napkins on spaghetti night that look they were used to clean up a crime scene. Most disturbingly, food will end up in places you never imagined food could go, like the inside of your toddler’s nose, ears, and diapers. If you prepare yourself for this (and worse), it will be slightly easier to handle.
Then there’s your home, which won’t be the same until the toddler years are over, so you might not want to invest in any fine furnishings or decor until you’ve emerged on the other side. Until then, make the most of the destruction. Peanut butter handprints on the wall that won’t wash off become custom artwork. A trail of Cheerios through the home might one day lead rescuers to your exhausted body. Are these ideas extreme? Of course! But going with the flow sure beats making yourself so crazy that you end up rocking in the corner. Keeping a shred of your sanity intact is key for your survival.
Put an old T-shirt over your toddler to keep her from dirtying her clothes at mealtime. It’s like a full-body bib!
It’s also important to understand that teaching your toddler proper eating habits can often lead to greater messes. Using utensils, for example, is a shockingly hard skill for some toddlers to grasp, and there won’t be many meals where your toddler’s fork doesn’t end up on the floor at least five times. In uncoordinated hands, spoons will dribble soup and cereal onto tables and clothes. Make sure you have lots of stain remover close by.
Above all, don’t overemphasize neatness. Yes, you want your toddler to be clean, but you don’t want to give her a complex about it. Make sure she’s eating healthy stuff and take deep breaths. The laundry is just collateral damage.
MEALTIME MISSTEPS
With every meal there are tactical mistakes that can doom you from the start. Make sure you avoid the following:
• Don’t become your toddler’s short order cook. The first time you make her a different meal than the rest of the family won’t be the last.
• Don’t unload the groceries in front of her unless you want to hear immediate complaints and/or demands to eat items immediately.
• Just like you don’t negotiate with terrorists, you don’t negotiate with toddlers. Once you start saying, “One bite of carrots and you can have a cookie,” your toddler has won. The next thing you know, a few months will pass and the rate of business will have slowly bumped up to the point where you’re trading five cookies and a scoop of ice cream for that same, teensy-weensy bite of carrots.
• Don’t overfill her plate. Toddlers have small stomachs and can often be overwhelmed by large amounts of food.
• Don’t act like the drill sergeant from Full Metal Jacket and stand over your toddler screaming, “You will eat that vegetable, young lady, or so help me!” That pressure doesn’t help and will only make her resent vegetables (and you).
• Don’t overdo it on the fruit snacks. They’re loaded with sugar and all too easy to hand out, especially when your toddler keeps running up to you every five minutes asking for you to open a new one. Instead, keep your kid hungry so that at dinner she’ll actually eat instead of pushing away her dinner because her tummy is filled with 101 fruit snacks.
• Don’t forget that it’s a long process. Your toddler probably won’t be pitching a fit and refusing veggies at twenty. If she’s eating, that’s a step in the right direction. Keep pushing for incremental gains.
TODDLER VISION
HOW YOU SEE THE WORLD:
HOW YOUR TODDLER SEES THE WORLD:
CANDY
If you’ve ever seen a horror film where zombies relentlessly come after human flesh with single-minded determination, then you’ve got a pretty good idea of how toddlers feel about candy. This wouldn’t be a problem if candy was good for your toddler, but it’s not only bad for her, it will throw your lives into disarray for hours after she’s ingested it.
There are three stages your toddler will pass through after she’s greedily stuffed her face with candy. In the first, she will be manically hyper for anywhere from fifteen minutes to a couple of hours, and spend that time leaping off things without any regard for her safety. In the next stage, she will be overtired and cranky, either breaking into tears for no apparent reason or throwing punches at you whenever you come within a three-foot radius of her. Finally, she will crash and nap for way longer than you like, ruining bedtime and your night.
That miserable cycle is reason enough to permanently ban candy from your toddler’s life, but it’s not the only reason you should. As they say on infomercials, “But wait… there’s more!” Toddlers are also incapable of enjoying candy without making a mess, and their hands and face will be coated with chocolate even before the wrapper hits the floor. Once that happens you will have only a few seconds to jump in and clean your toddler before she wipes the chocolate onto her clothes, but be warned: if you don’t deftly grab her wrists and hold them in the air as you bust out the wipes, your clothes will likely end up horribly stained too.
To distract your toddler from the candy display when checking out at the supermarket, ask her to help you put items on the conveyor belt. If it’s still not your turn, put items back into the cart and repeat the process.
Clearly, limiting your toddler’s candy intake should be a major priority. The good news is that this is fairly easy to do in your own home—just don’t bring the sweet stuff through your front door. The bad news is that, while you can control candy in your home, it becomes much harder to do once you step outside. That’s because, until you have a toddler, you never realize just how much candy there is in public. Basically, candy is everywhere, and toddlers have a hawk-like ability to spot even two lone M&Ms from a thousand feet away.
In order to at least attempt to stay one step ahead of your toddler, you will need to immediately scan every room you enter for candy. Upon finding some, either remove it or your toddler as quickly as possible. You will also need to learn which of the aisles at the supermarket are stocked up the wazoo with candy, and have a game plan for what to do when you get into the check
out line with its impossibly large candy display. (Whoever came up with the idea of putting candy at the checkout, by the way, has a special place in hell waiting for them.)
Another major struggle you will face will be dealing with the many people in public who offer your toddler candy without consulting you first. Whenever this happens (and it will happen a lot), you will be put in the unenviable position of having to either say “no,” and send your toddler into a tantrum, or say “yes,” and be forced to deal with the fallout for the rest of the day.
The one saving grace of candy is that (like most things of great power) it can be harnessed for good instead of evil. While using candy as a bribe to get what you want was briefly covered in the previous chapter, it will be discussed in much greater detail in the chapters to come.
A RANKING OF THE BEST PLACES TO HIDE CANDY
(FROM WORST TO BEST):
The highest cupboard in the kitchen: This is a good spot until your toddler gets wind of it. After that she’ll spend her free time stacking chairs to try to climb up to it, giving you more than a few gray hairs in the process.
The lowest cupboard in the kitchen: The upside here is that if your toddler figures out your hiding space there’s no chance she’ll fall from a great height. The downside is that she’ll eat every last candy in the bag and spend the next forty-eight hours running in a circle.