\u201cWould you like to color? How about we color? Want to color? Great. Hold on \u2026 Oh no! You can\u2019t put a Crayon in the electrical outlet?!?\u201d<\/p>\n
It was like I had never done it before. Like I had no idea what a toddler was. Had never had one before. Had no idea how to entertain one. <\/p>\n
My 9-year-old daughter stood mesmerized by her 1-1\/2-year-old cousin. We were all babysitting so my brother and his wife could go to a wedding. We had him for maybe 2 hours, and we were exhausted afterward. Exhausted, like we had just wrestled a tornado. Like we had just herded wild horses. Like there were 17 of him. <\/p>\n
Toddlers are interesting people. How quickly I had forgotten. <\/p>\n
\u201cCan\u2019t we make him nap or just plant him in front of a basketball game?\u201d I asked my wife. \u201cWhat\u2019s that medicine that makes dogs sleep on planes? Is that legal?\u201d
\n<\/p>\n
And this was a good kid. Didn\u2019t cry. Didn\u2019t scream. Didn\u2019t toss things or chew a hole in the drywall. This was an \u201ceasier\u201d toddler. But, that said, no toddler is easy. They go everywhere. It\u2019s like letting a bolt of lightning loose in your house. Our un-baby-proofed house. \u201cWhat do you mean we can\u2019t leave steak knives on the table?!?\u201d<\/p>\n
They have the attention spans of frozen peas, bouncing from thing to thing like super-charged ping pong balls. And nothing in my house is toddler-certified. <\/p>\n
\u201cStriker, want to play with this?\u201d I would ask.<\/p>\n
\u201cNo!\u201d my wife would shout. \u201cChoking hazard!\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cHow about this?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cCertainly not. Causes cancer in lab rats in California!\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThen why do WE have it!?!\u201d<\/p>\n
Soon came mealtime. It was not so much a feeding as a controlled explosion. At least the dog ate well. About 65 percent of the food the kid sent to his mouth ended up on his bib, the high chair, the floor, even the backseat of a car down the street. It was like watching Old Faithful erupt. The dog started dragging her tongue across the floor like a mop. <\/p>\n
\u201cWas I ever like this?\u201d my horrified and slightly repulsed daughter asked after a fork whizzed by her ear. <\/p>\n
\u201cYes, honey. But thankfully, you grew up.\u201d <\/p>\n
How quickly I had forgotten. How much I had taken for granted. How we had gone from this to that. How easy life had become. It took a moment like this to put it all into perspective. To relive the past \u2014 a bit of longing for the old days mixed in with relief that the old days were gone forever. <\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m totally beat,\u201d I told my wife after our sister-in-law came to pick the boy up. \u201cHow did we ever survive that?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI have no idea,\u201d she said, pooped. <\/p>\n
The dog \u2014 belly full and swelling \u2014 wondered when we would be babysitting again. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u201cWould you like to color? How about we color? Want to color? Great. Hold on \u2026 Oh no! You can\u2019t put a Crayon in the electrical outlet?!?\u201d It was like I had never done it before. Like I had no idea what a toddler was. Had never had one before. Had no idea how to entertain one. My 9-year-old daughter stood mesmerized by her 1-1\/2-year-old cousin. We were all babysitting so my brother and his wife could go to a wedding. We had him for maybe 2 hours, and we were exhausted afterward. Exhausted, like we had just wrestled a tornado. Like we had just herded wild horses. Like there were 17 of him. Toddlers are interesting people. How quickly I had forgotten. \u201cCan\u2019t we make him nap or just plant him in front of a basketball game?\u201d I asked my wife. \u201cWhat\u2019s that medicine that makes dogs sleep on planes? Is that legal?\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[553,561],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1386","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2015-nutshells","category-family"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nutshellcity.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1386","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nutshellcity.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nutshellcity.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nutshellcity.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nutshellcity.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1386"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.nutshellcity.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1386\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1387,"href":"https:\/\/www.nutshellcity.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1386\/revisions\/1387"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nutshellcity.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1386"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nutshellcity.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1386"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nutshellcity.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1386"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}