Life Lessons
This past weekend was a weekend of life’s lessons. And we learned more than a few. The most spectacular lesson was the answer to the age-old question, “What happens if three toddlers miss their naps for three consecutive days and are then expected to act remotely human at a solemn religious ceremony on the third day?”
We departed Friday morning with smiles on our faces and songs in our hearts, expecting stellar behavior from our precious angels. Lesson 1: Pride goeth before a fall. Three and a half hours later, the kids were still behaving well, but I was snapping at Chris, “I need five hundred extra calories a day to feed this kid; the least you can do is get me to a restaurant within a reasonable enough time to eat before I starve to death.” Here, a dual lesson: When Colleen is pregnant or nursing, don’t bother to argue when her blood sugar is low; just duck and cover. Secondly, when someone tells you that mapquest directions are notoriously unreliable, LISTEN. (I should add that Chris learned a related lesson many months ago, and the effects are still felt. The lesson was, if Colleen’s pregnant or nursing and snapping at you, the LAST THING on the face of God’s earth that you should do is suggest to her that she MIGHT be overreacting because of low blood sugar.) Finally, we arrived at the National Air and Space museum and had lunch in their solarium before exploring the exhibits. The kids had such fun pretending to fly planes—at least, that’s what I’m told; I wouldn’t know because apparently the sight of aeronautical equipment really stokes Reagan’s appetite, and I was parked on a bench, feeding her for most of the visit. I don’t think she stopped for a breath for the entire two hours we were there. After NASM, we headed over to the Museum of American History, which is my version of Mecca: the location of Jacqueline Kennedy’s pearls and several of her ball gowns. The boys were not especially interested in the First Ladies exhibit, but both were impressed with “The American Presidency: A Glorious Burden,” where there are some hallways that replicate the inside of the Whitehouse and an interactive “You be the President” activity. Here we learned the most amusing lesson of all—if you put Connor behind a podium, there’s no telling what he’s going to say. He began with, “Hello Americans. The President loves you.” So he started out pretty normally. Then, “And I am here to announce that THE GENETIC EXPERIMENTS WILL NOW END!” Huh? Here, several people stopped to watch, and he really began to pick up steam. “We will go to Mars, and take the information there, where it will reside. That’s right, we will reside. And about those evil experiments, don’t worry, Americans, because the Marines are brave and strong, and Uncle Ryan is the strongest, and he can kill everybody if he has to.” Super. Can’t wait to notify my brother that someone in our nation’s capital is maligning him as being ready to “kill everybody if he has to.” We actually had to drag him away from the podium as he was screeching, “God bless you and America!” We arrived at our hotel completely exhausted, but the kids seemed to be just getting their second wind and insisted on swimming in the indoor pool in lieu of going to bed early. At the pool, I learned that while Chris is normally very laid back in his parenting, the surest way to give him a panic attack is to put Riley Kate, aka Stuntwoman Elio, near a body of water. Whereas Connor and Ror shriek in fear after putting one foot into a pool deeper than a bathtub (on this occasion Ror even screamed, “DANGER! This is too DANGEROUS!”), Riley Kate seems to have a death wish every time she puts on a swim suit. She alternated between making Chris’s blood run cold with her careening around the tile edge of the pool, and standing just at the edge of the water and alerting Chris to her plan with a menacing, “WATCH, Daddy! WATCH me!” before leaping off the edge only to get snagged by Chris every time. He was pretty pale as we headed back toward the room. Upon entering our suite, the children discovered that—oh joy!— there was not only a giant Jacuzzi in the middle of the master bedroom, but it was surrounded by a two foot wide tile deck from which they could do death defying stunts before leaping into the empty Jacuzzi. Again, Riley-Kate seemed to be the ring leader of the let’s-give-our-parents-a-stroke activities.
After a night of little sleep (who wants to sleep when there are so many unexplored areas and breakables in the hotel room?), we headed over to Sara and Erik’s house to meet them and Kate’s family (see “Kate’s blog” link at right) for brunch. The kids played so nicely together and had such a great time that we decided to head right to the Science Center instead of afternoon naps. Strangely, I feel that I almost SENSED the foreshadowing of the following day’s meltdown as I consented to allow the children to skip naps once again. Anyway, at the Baltimore Science Center, the kids careened around the children’s area and performed all kinds of cool experiments. Riley Kate attempted to eat an entire tray of bingo chips that were meant for a magnet demonstration, but other than that, we all emerged unscathed. We wisely decided to take the kids home for an early bedtime, only to scrap that idea immediately after Chris saw all of the cool restaurants along Inner Harbor. So, because we are masochists, we decided to go out to dinner with the kids, who are normally well behaved at restaurants, but when tired resemble a cross between tazmanian devils and the scariest scenes from The Exorcist. Surprisingly, the kids were charming and sweet at dinner. They talked animatedly about what they had seen and done at the Science Center and conversed with the waitstaff politely. We felt like we had really dodged a bullet. Then it came time to get the check. Connor gazed mournfully at his half eaten meal, which he just could not finish. Connor has been lately having empathy for inanimate objects, especially food. He feels terribly that uneaten food will be thrown away and thereby denied its opportunity to fulfill its culinary destiny in the process of digestion. So Chris and I have come up with a great explanation about uneaten food becoming part of the earth again through the process of decomposition, and later growing into other kinds of food. It’s all very “Circle of Life,” and the it’s-never-really-gone moral sits very well with Connor. So when the waiter came to take his plate away, instead of just saying, “thanks,” Connor looked deep into the waiter’s eyes and handed him his plate, saying solemnly, “Please send my food back to the earth for me, so that it can join with the soil to make new food.” The waiter looked at us like we were nuts.
We returned to the hotel and crashed. In the morning, we could tell that Riley Kate was “in a snit”, as my grandmother would say. We hadn’t even left the hotel room before we discovered that there was no way she was going to behave reasonably during Mass. But wow, she totally surpassed all expectations and threw a meltdown fit that went beyond even our wildest predictions. She was mad that her outfit was not a dress. She was mad that she was only wearing one hairbow instead of two. She was mad that Chris wanted her to sit still. In general, our girl was ANGRY. By the time Mass was over, Chris and I were totally spent, but our biggest task lay before us: convincing the kids to sit quietly in a pew while we stood at the baptismal font for our goddaughter’s baptism. This was just flat out not going to happen. When we got up to stand beside Natalie’s parents, Ror started wailing, “I want to come too! I want to come too!” Mercifully, Sara’s father wrangled Riley Kate and Daniel’s godfather managed to corral the other two while Reagan slept peacefully in her seat. Chris and I were incredibly proud and happy to witness and participate in Natalie’s baptism, and, in the word’s of Natalie’s four-year-old brother Nick, “Fortunately, the baptism went well.”
Back at the house, Sara had arranged a beautiful spread of appetizers on the table, where Ror immediately parked himself, along with Sara’s kids and Connor. They were all talking and eating and having great fun, when someone tried to take a carrot stick from the crudite platter in front of Ror, who mistakenly thought that the entire PLATTER was his plate. This caused a meltdown of epic proportions. He calmed down only after Nick and Dan escorted him to the sunroom and proceeded to explain the ins and outs of building a roof trestle.
The overarching life lesson of this past weekend’s trip is clear: NAPS ARE SACRED. Skip them AT YOUR OWN PERIL!
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