Aging with grace

Nico turns two tomorrow. And so I am blowing up balloons so we can surprise her with them in the morning. I had forgotten how much your cheeks hurt when you blow up like ten balloons in a row and, around my sixth, I had this thought:

this is my life now.

Anyone who has followed this blog knows I am a (somewhat) reluctant parent. Not that I don’t love the gal, but I also love(d) my single free life that included few to no evenings spent blowing up balloons, or afternoons spent shimming shit off of cloth diapers, or mornings spent pretending that a stuffed dinosaur wants to eat my child’s fruit so my child will eat her fruit at a slightly normal pace so that we can get her out the door and to daycare so that we can then have a few hours to ourselves to, well, work.

But in the past few months, probably since Nico’s started to really talk, I have (almost) settled into this whole mother thing. There is a certain charm to blowing up twenty balloons, while drinking a beer, while reading an article on my computer about Tampa, my hometown, picking Jameis Winston for its football team (well, ok, that’s not happy news).

It’s not quite the same thing as sewing strange costumes with your roommates and then putting them on and going to the gay bar to sing karaoke show tunes late into the night because you know you can crash later and sleep for hours and no one will wake you up.

But motherhood has it charms. Like today. We went out to get supplies for the small birthday party we’re going to throw for Nico on Sat (a piñata, paper plates, temporary tattoos, lots of booze) and on the way home she started to sing:

“Shake Shake Booty! Shake Shake Booty!”

It was a variation on the KC and the Sunshine Band’s “Shake Shake Shake Shake Your Booty” that I had just been singing to her. And I tell you, not to get all sentimental here, but hearing a two year old say “booty” kind of breaks your heart. For real.

In other news, Nico’s daycare has put pictures of all the toddlers in her room on a bulletin board and included two descriptor words for each child. Some children have “Investigator” and “Animal Lover” others “Greeter” and “Reader.”

And Nico?

Her’s were “Nurturer” and “Accessory lover.”

It was enough to make me give up parenthood on the spot. How in the hell, I wondered, did a child of mine, at two years no less, become an accessory lover?

This is how (photo is blurry, sorry, but the child moves so much now it’s hard to get her to stay still)

To Doughnut or to Muffin, that is the question

There are so many customs and practices you don’t realize exist until you have kids. I had no idea cloth diapers had evolved from those clothespinned rags my parents used to put me in, for instance. Or that daycares cost more than rent. I also had NEVER EVER heard of the ubiquitous daycare ritual “Doughnuts with Dad” or its alliteratively female counterpart “Muffins with Mom.”

This happened at Nico’s first daycare last year, but she was so young we paid little attention. This year, however, she’s old enough to notice that the hallway outside the toddler classroom in her new daycare is suddenly filled with a bunch of grinning suit-and-tied men sharing chocolate covereds with their toddlers one morning and then a bunch of women swigging orange juice and splitting mini blueberry muffins with their kids the next day.

So the question becomes: to doughnut or to muffin? Obviously if we are going to be literal about this, Marta and I should both go to Muffins with Mom, because we are both of the motherly persuasion (though Nico calls Marta Mamá and me Mom).

But I also just FEEL that these doughnutted and muffined days are really more about getting both parents involved, if there are two parents, or getting one parent involved doubly if there is only one parent, or, really, just getting parents to spend time with their kids alongside other parents and their kids. In other words, it seems to me that gender is irrelevant to the inherent goal of this alliterative practice.

But then it’s hard not to notice that no one else thinks the way I do. On Doughnuts with Dads day there are only men eating sweets and on Muffins with Mom day the hallways look like an Alpha Phi reunion. So to eat a doughnut does indeed feel like something of a political act.

This is frustrating. But even more frustrating is that I don’t even like sweets. And I don’t really want Nico eating lots of sweets when she’s not yet developed a taste for them. Which is why I’ve decided there really should be a new day, or perhaps five new days in which parental types and food items come together to celebrate family. Quiche with Queer Parent day is one I would definitely attend. For all those single parents, perhaps a Scones with Single Mom/Dad. And then there could always be Gobstoppers with Grandparents. Or, really, if we’re going to simplify and de-gender this whole thing, what about Pizza with Parent(s). Cause who doesn’t like pizza?

This year, in the end, we both wound up going to Muffins with Mom, not because we lack political daycare gumption, but because neither of us had been paying attention to the emails alerting us to these upcoming events, and we just happened to have more time today, Muffins with Mom day, than yesterday, Doughnuts with Dad day. Though if I could do it all over again, I’d definitely go to Dad’s day for one simple fact: they had REAL doughnuts from an actual doughnut shop, which is a draw even for a woman who doesn’t like sweets. We mom’s, on the other hand, were saddled with those nasty grocery store muffins that shine an unhealthy pink or lavender and probably could survive another hundred years without rotting.

All of which is to say that baked goods are clearly sexist. And now I’m kind of hungry for pizza.