What’s That Sound

What’s That Sound: Birthday Edition.

posted on December 19, 2016 by Rachel Callahan · 7 Comments Filed Under: Kids: The Experience., The Blissfulness of Life, What's That Sound

Today, this kid is turning six.

He’s become quite an adventurer this year, always willing to take on a challenge. And ask questions. And ask more questions. And also more. Questions.

Here are a few things he’s said or asked recently…

“These mints are too spicy. I’m going to save them for when I’m older. I’ll like them then.”

“Uh, you probably should just give them to your sister.”

“No! I’ll be six in just a few days!!”

“You know what would be nice?”

“What?”

“To have a little brother.”

“Oh really? You want me to have a baby in my tummy?”

“Yes. Can you do that?”

“Not anymore.”

“But you could put a baby in your tummy?”

“Well, me and Daddy could…”

“And how exactly do you make a baby be in your tummy?”

“Well, that’s an interesting question…”

Stomping off to the bathroom after a particularly tight hug….

“Mom made me pee in my pants! That’s how hard she squozed me.”

“Your shirt smells like coffee.”

(I smell it) “No it doesn’t.”

“Okay well then your chest smells like coffee.”

Me: “What is this gunk all over your fingernails?” (I start scraping) “Wait. Is this poop?”

“Yeah I did poop last night….”

“Let’s go wash your hands.”

“But I just did.”

“There’s POOP on your fingernails. Not good enough. What happened last night??”

“I had to change my pants and my underwear…and I got most of it off the floor…”

“What went wrong???”

“I pooped.”

Upon taking a hilarious video of him, he demanded,

“Delete it!!!!! And kick yourself!!!!!”

Speaking of, here’s a little compilation of a few fantastic seconds of Noah Videos from the year…

And now I’ll go kick myself.

Happy sixth birthday, kid.

p.s. This year, Noah especially enjoyed watching these old videos of himself from when he was two and a half. He had no idea he was such a fashion icon as a toddler. He requests that for his birthday, you watch and enjoy as well.

7 Comments

On the Growth of a Man.

posted on August 29, 2016 by Rachel Callahan · 5 Comments Filed Under: Kids: The Experience., What's That Sound

Noah has been busy lately, growing up and stuff.

He’s become a puzzlingly model student (he has for his entire life held a staunch non-education policy), his imagination is running wild with ideas of commerce, and he got his first loose tooth.

He tried to play the tooth thing cool, just slipping it into conversation one morning.

“Oh by the way Mom, I have a loose tooth.”

He snarled his face into a grimace to attempt to hold the smile back.

But I knew he’d been waiting on that development for years, desperately ripping at his teeth even at three years old, so I reacted with a level of excitement that made it irresistible for him to keep his straight face.

He began working on his tooth, night and day, wiggling and tugging, determined to accomplish this milestone of adulthood as soon as possible. There could be time found for tooth wiggling even at the waterpark.

The milestone brought about philosophical conversations about what it meant, and I mean REALLY meant, as well.

“You can’t have kids until you lose all your baby teeth and get adult teeth.”

Way to set some goals, kid.

Meanwhile, he opened up shop. He became a restaurateur, setting up vast and detailed restaurants in his room. At one point, they were picnic tables outside a food truck, which he named “Rocket City Food Truck.” Later, he opened up a full-service restaurant in my living room floor – and yes, it stayed there for many days.

During the Olympics, he insisted that I create themed décor to encourage more patrons to come, hence the ringed tablecloths.

Nothing made him have to bite the inside of his cheeks to keep from smiling more ferociously than for me to yell out “Hey! Table 4 needs a coffee refill! And Table 6 needs more cheese biscuits!! Table 9 isn’t waiting ANOTHER SECOND for their check!!”

To attract a hipster crowd, he built a fantastically fancy Tinker Toy coffee maker. Not sure if it’s French Press or Cold Brew, but whatever it is, there’s some seriously snobby coffee getting made – and the kind you have to hold your mouth just right to pour.

As I was cleaning out some stuff, I found these perfect placemats for him to decorate,

as well as an order pad.

…Because I’m pretty much the coolest hoarder there ever was.

His deductive reasoning is coming along nicely, too – last week, when trying to figure out why Not-Crazy-Renee didn’t answer my text right away, Noah philosophized,

“….Maybe she’s in the car…because she puts sunscreen on her kids when you don’t put sunscreen on us, so maybe she doesn’t text in the car like you do.*”

So yeah. According to Noah, Renee is a much more responsible person than me. All based on sunscreen.

* I do try not to text in the car. But sometimes when I’m at a traffic light, something has to be answered. And my father taught my children to (rightfully) fuss at me when I do. But that’s okay. They tattle on him driving WAY TOO FAST in return.

Noah has also busied himself asking me the tough questions of life, wrinkling up his nose and saying, “Mom, why do you smell like leggings?”

And, while watching the women’s gymnastics, inquiring, “Is there fire rings in the boys gymnastics?”

No, but there totally should be, son. And they should put you in charge of Olympic marketing.

After three weeks of working that tooth with the dedication of a Hyena picking clean the bones of roadkill, Noah came in my room one morning to wake me up, got in my bed to snuggle, and said,

“Oh yeah. I pulled my tooth out last night.”

“Wait WHAT?!? (His sister’s first tooth pull was full-on trauma. I didn’t know how to handle this casual news.) When??”

“After y’all put me to bed.”

“Why didn’t you come get us?”

“Because there was a 5 on the clock.”

“Wait a minute. So you woke up at 5am, pulled out your own tooth, and then went back to sleep?”

“Yup.”

“Did it bleed??”

“No.”

Did it hurt??”

“No.”

“Where’s your tooth?”

“On my bedside table.”

“That’s amazing…”

“I know. So I’m going to leave the Tooth Fairy a note telling her to give me a hundred dollars.”

….The kid has a top-notch brain, without a doubt.

5 Comments

On Parenting The Male Variety.

posted on February 19, 2016 by Rachel Callahan · 13 Comments Filed Under: A Day in the Life, Boy Child = Bizarre., Just My Luck, Kids: The Experience., Parent of the Year, What's That Sound

“That bad smell you’re sniffin’ is my feet.”

Because that’s what a little boy tells his sister, who is across the room, when she happens to have the sniffles.

He was sitting in my lap, though, so I should know – he wasn’t wrong.

His shoes have smelled so dead-rotted-carcass lately that one night I was in the living room after his bedtime, and I put all the throw blankets in the laundry room to wash and had sniffed every pillow on the couch before I realized that his shoes were hiding under said couch.

It’s like he plants little surprise gifts for me to gleefully discover while he sleeps.

But he’s not just a rancid smell.

He’s also a confidently panicking backseat driver.

He can see my gas gauge. And notices when it turns from blue to orange. And freaks. The crap. Out.

“Mommy please can you get gas right now? There’s a gas station! STOOOOOOOOP!!!”

And then there are his veiled suggestions.

“Mommy I’d just like to let you know that the Waffle House is nearby.”

Never gonna happen, kid.

But his latest craze in over-stepping his job description is being a hands-on-the-wheel hawk. I really had no idea how often I took both hands off the wheel (usually when moving half a mile an hour or less) until Noah decided that freaking out about it was his new mission in life.

The first time it happened, I thought it would be fun to egg on this annoying little quirk in my son, so I began singing and holding my arms in the air like I just didn’t care.

I mean. What’s the point of having a new car with perfect alignment if not to drive without my hands on the wheel?

This did not help my life.

It did, however, ramp up his constant state of car anxiety by a gigapanic. He could see every microsecond that took place while I switched between driving with my right hand and my left hand and he would start screaming and/or crying. Because nothing makes a Mommy a better driver than a needlessly wailing five-year-old.

As I was driving out of the Chick-Fil-A drive-through (at a quarter mile an hour) and handing the children their bags of food, he began crying and yelling “Don’t drive right now!!! PLEAAAAAAASE!!!”

After the fifteenth time of telling him to never mention that my hands weren’t on the steering wheel again, he adopted the habit of simply growling quietly.

His anxiety also bleeds over into his life ambitions…such as this conversation we had.

“When I grow up I want to shoot fireworks.”

“Okay buddy.”

“But I don’t know how to.”

“You can read on the internet how to do it.”

“But I don’t know how to read.”

“You will when you’re grown up.”

“But where IS the internet?”

“You know what I’ll just teach you how to shoot fireworks.”

“Okay.”

And he has many questions about the future, too. Questions I do try to answer with the best of my abilities.

Noah: “Mom, what does voting really mean?”

[I explain the entire democratic system]

Noah: “Well, [Redacted toddler friend] says voting is showing our booty and that isn’t nice.”

…It doesn’t take much to imagine the conversation that particular friend overheard her dad having about voters showing their booty.

But Noah’s greatest talent, by far, is his ability to always plant his elbows firmly into my boobs.

Whether he’s in my lap and sitting up, or crawling into my lap, or I’m three rooms away and there’s no need for elbow-to-boob contact of any kind, he slays me. Literally. And it’s not like I haven’t told him every single time to never ever plant his elbows into my chest ever ever again, but apparently, elbows have no long-term memory.

Right now, because I’m still not allowed to lift him, his use of elbows to lift himself has become even more pronounced.

Which is how we reached the climax of our elbow/boob misunderstandings.

I was laying on my bed first thing in the morning, and he came in to cuddle with me/beg me for breakfast. Instead of going around to the other side of the bed like a NORMAL HUMAN, he decided to lift himself up and over me.

Instead of pushing on the bed with his palms to lift himself like a NORMAL HUMAN, he planted an elbow in each boob and lifted his entire 48 pound body with a double-elbow-to-boob deadlift as if he was going to use them to javelin over me.

(And they totally felt like javelins, lemme tell you.)

…Except that he didn’t seem to know how to transition from hanging from his elbows to climbing onto the bed, so he just hung there, looking at me expectantly.

In the eternal second during which my boobs were being ground into my spinal column, my thoughts went as follows,

“THE PAAAAAIN!!! Oh crap I can’t lift him over me I’m gonna die I’m gonna die right here whatdoIdo to get this kid and his pickaxe elbows OFF MY BOOBS RIGHT NOW!?!?!”

My survival instincts kicked in and completely eclipsed my nurturing mother instincts. Without processing what was happening, I grabbed his shoulders and in one move, shoved him off of the bed.

MOMMY. FAIL.

He landed a few feet away in a clump, and I looked down in horror at what I had just done (okay really I was just hoping that this finally taught him to respect the boobs.)

He started crying and climbed up onto the bed (this time with no boob contact) to be comforted, but not without giving me a shocked and accusatory look. After a full examination, I was able to determine that his feet got a bit rug-burned from the fall.

(But this rug-burned feet recovered way faster than my boobs, so there’s that.)

Since I know his Book of Blame has an extremely long-term memory and he’ll be saying “Hey Mom remember that time you threw me off the bed?” for the next fifteen years, we’ll see if that helps his elbows remember the lesson from the moment.