Recently in Miscellaneous Category

It sure would be helpful to have an extra arm. Sure it would look kind of weird, but imagine how much easier it would be to manage two under two if you had an extra arm for things like closing doors, digging out your keys, or hanging on to one child while you put the other in his car seat ...

... and since we're talking extra appendages, I could also use a few extra brain cells. I must get my kids' names confused four or five times a day. Sometimes I even call the baby by his older sister's name, and vice-versa. I used to say that pregnancy was a form of dementia, now I think all of parenthood is.

An extra eye, I could use one of those too. In the back of my head. Yes, that's a cliche but think how handy that would be--when one child is walking ahead of you and the other is walking behind you and won't catch up no matter how wildly you gesture or how artful your combination of bribery and threats ("Hurry up so I can buy you a soda! Hurry up, or we won't get to ride the carousel!") you could still keep an eye on both of them.

How about four legs, in addition to my three arms. I could be a three-eyed, three-armed Centaur mom. Scary, but effective. Fast enough to chase down a speedy toddler (who would be running from me in abject terror anyway), nimble enough to carry two children and turn the key in the front door at the same time, sharp-eyed enough to watch one child on the swing set and the other at the opposite end of the playground, smart enough to help one kid with his flower project while calling the other one by her correct name. Yes, being a monster would be quite handy.

As a two-under-two parent, you do become pretty adept at using your foot as an arm. I am constantly hooking doors with my toe or shutting them with my heal as I lug the baby carrier with one arm and carry a screaming, kicking toddler under the other. But I still haven't figured out how to fish my keys out of my purse with my toes. I guess that's as close as I'm going to get.

My husband and I took our family to a crowded event over the weekend. There was a bouncy house, go-kart racing, mini-golf and all kinds of fun kids stuff, but there was a crowd. At events like that, I am enormously thankful for my double stroller.

After letting Natalie, my overactive toddler, bounce off the walls of the mini-golf course for an hour or so, my husband and I decided to give the older kids a turn on the go-karts. He went down with them to the arcade to get tickets, and I put Natalie in the front seat of the stroller while Henry, my three month old, slept in the back.

Natalie was not having any of it. She's two years old, and all her little legs want to do is run. She doesn't care where I am, and she isn't afraid of anything. Cars. Strangers. Cliff edges (not that there were any at this event, but you get the idea). So she sat in the front of the stroller wailing, shrieking, and fighting the straps while I studiously ignored her.

A few minutes into the meltdown, I noticed a very crunchy looking lady with a four or five year old girl giving me a cold look. I studiously ignored her, too, but a few minutes later she approached me, smiling a fabricated smile, looking very crunchy indeed in her hemp vest and organic cotton beret.

"Why don't you let her out? She just wants to run." Then she added, broadly gesturing around the crowded park: "Because you know, that's what this is all about."

I looked at her and at her one child and saw red. First of all, she had no idea what Natalie was like. Second of all, she was talking to me as if she was a graduate of Dr. Excellent Mom's School of Being a Perfect Parent, and I but a lowly dropout from the Unenlightened Institute of Stupid Mothers.

"I would," I said, "but you see I have this baby here, and I can't watch him and a loose toddler at the same time."

"Well I'll watch her," she replied, like it was so obvious, like I should have pegged her right away as the free-nanny-to-total-strangers'-children type.

"Thanks, but my husband will be back in a minute." There was no way I was going to leave a stranger in charge of my child, especially one who was distracted by her own kid and had no idea what she was getting herself into when offering to watch Natalie the Hazard-Seeker. And also I thought she was a bitch, but there you go.

She persisted. At that point I really couldn't believe it, the persisting. I was doing my best to present an air of "get the hell out of here," but there she was. Still.

"I know what it's like," she continued. "I have two of them really close in age like you do." I looked over at her one child and wondered, if it was so easy, why the hell she'd only brought one of them with her, and why she had to have two girlfriends there to help her. But of course I didn't say that, dang it. In these situations, the clever comebacks don't occur to you until much later.

Here's what else I should have said:

"Well lady, since you too have two under two, why don't you tell me, which one of your children is least important to you? Would you leave your baby sleeping in a stroller in the middle of a crowded park while you ran off through the grass after your toddler, because you'd care less about losing him? Or would you rather let your toddler disappear into the crowd because she's less important than the baby? Please, help me decide, because silly, naive me, I love my children equally and I just can't seem to choose between them."

At that point my husband returned, and I steered away from the still-smiling crunchy lady and tried to stop feeling angry, lest it ruin the rest of my morning. (By the way, I really don't have anything against hemp and organic cotton, just that particular lady and the way she was wearing it).

I vented to my husband, who told me I shouldn't worry about what stupid people think. He's right, but as long as I live I will never understand why some people feel the need to parent other people's children. Most parents are doing what they think is right for their own children, and if you disagree, well, please keep it to yourself.

When Natalie was about six weeks old, we were at the grocery store on a Sunday afternoon. She was snoozing in her infant seat and I was browsing the avocados when one of the store's employees peered into her carrier and smiled.

"I can't remember that," he told me.

"Remember what?"

"That. My daughter is 18 months old, and I can't remember her being that age at all."

I smiled and gave him a canned response: "They grow up too fast."

But later I thought about what he'd said, and realized how frighteningly true those words were for me, too. Natalie was my third child, and no matter how hard I thought about it, I could remember very little about my two-year-old's babyhood. I mean, I could remember how much she weighed at birth, I could remember that we had nursing difficulties, that she had acid reflux, that she would "army crawl" and that she could say "elbow" when she was 11 months old, but I was just remembering the facts. The feelings were all gone--that feeling of holding a newborn, of hearing those funny little sounds newborns make, the experience of seeing your baby roll over for the first time--all those things were gone. I could remember the facts but not the details, not the things that really mattered. Why?

None of my other life experiences were like that. I can vividly remember sitting on the battlements of Dolwyddelan Castle in North Wales, I can remember what it felt like to touch the names on the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington D.C., and I have very strong recollections of exploring the Tower of London. And all those things happened many years before I had my children, and they were far less significant to me.

Maybe it's because as parents, we live for the moment every single day. When we travel, we do it for short periods of time and we file those memories away when we return home, to be revisited during duller moments. But as parents, every day is a new experience. Every day is something to be cherished. We don't file those memories away because we are so busy making new ones.

Your children will always exist for you in the moment. I love my two year old because she is my funny, chubby faced little girl who likes to walk on her toes and laughs the most wonderful belly laugh. When I look at her I just can't imagine her being anything other than what she is right now, at this moment.

That's why I write everything down. Everything. Everything my kids do, everything they say, every funny little mannerism they have. I take pictures. Lots of pictures. I journal and I take video.

If those memories are going to escape me, they aren't going to get far.