My son is goofy by nature, a jester by trade, and delights in keeping us all in stitches with his daily antics. When I was pregnant with him, I fantasized about how we'd spend our day together: Reading classic children's stories by lamplight while he sat comfortably in my lap, mimicking each other with vocabulary exercises and singing sweet lullabies in a soothing tone while he played with my hair. I never visualized how it would actually turn out: Chasing him down the hallway when he gleefully and victoriously steals the book from my hands, making up new lyrics to classic lullabies that I sing in a ridiculously high falsetto while we dance around like lunatics, and how he enjoys not running his hands through my hair, but rather poking his little index finger into my corneas while showing off his anatomical prowess by saying "EYE!".
I fully realize that I'm cultivating future class clowns and armchair comedians, but I refuse to believe that this is a bad thing. There's plenty ... scratch that, there's too many opportunities in life to be serious, and I'm sure they'll be able to discern when they get older when acting silly and being funny is appropriate, and when it's not. For now, I just want their earliest childhood memories to be happy, fun and filled with laughter. Sometimes it's tricky to get them to calm down after an especially long afternoon of reckless folly, but my son seems to sleep better at night after exhausting his seemingly endless supply of energy by dancing around the living room acting a fool to an appreciative, familiar audience. He's actually quite shy around people he doesn't know, so I don't worry much about him going into spaz mode in public.
One thing my kids love is to look at photos of themselves, and I take at least a dozen pictures of them at play each day. They're so used to having the iPhone pointed at their faces that it doesn't seem to phase them, and that makes for some perfectly candid shots of them at their merriest. Even at my most disgruntled, in-a-funk moments, I can view these photos of the five of us having a jolly good time and it feels like the sun shines inside me. So while their happiness is my catharsis, I'm certain that Jovial Mommy is preferable to them than Serious Mommy, or Busy Mommy, or that dreaded old battle axe that no one can stand being in the same room with - Tired Mommy. Sometimes it's difficult to be "on" for your kids all the time. I find that mirroring their carefree, happy-go-lucky personas even when I'm moody and not particularly feeling it helps me be more of a kindred spirit to them, someone they can count on to not pull the wind out of their sails or pee on their parades. While conventional wisdom teaches us to be a parent first and a friend second, I don't see why the two can't be interchangeable, especially while they're toddlers. I know there will be a time when my silliness will be lost on them and probably embarrass them - as all kids inevitably grow up to be way too cool to enjoy hanging with the 'rents, so I'm going to suck every second of this up while I can.
My Facebook friends and family get kicks out of the photos I share of me, dad and the kids acting like morons, and it's a grand opportunity for me and the husband to let our hair down, forget that we're forty-somethings with our fair share of aches, pains and stress and abandon crummy adulthood by having fun with our kids. I think I take it farther than my husband does with the childish antics, as sometimes I forget to take my voice off of playful falsetto when we're swapping stories at the end of the day. Or we'll be in a serious discussion and I'll peekaboo him, just for the hell of it. Once we stole away to the farthest reaches of our boudoir for some of that fifteen-minutes-of-bliss parents of toddlers live for, and we both ended up getting the giggles over the ridiculous sing-song music still blaring from our television because we forgot to change the channel. It might have killed the moment for us as far as savage, wonton lovemaking went - but simultaneously being afflicted with a case of the uncontrollable giggles is right up there next to the big "O", in our opinion. Both leaves us sweaty, out of breath, and deeply fulfilled on an intimate level. Quality time, that!
A couple of months ago we sat in the living room with the twins on our laps and our son zipping in and out between us, and an opportunity presented itself for us to make a game out of fashioning burp rags to our daughter's heads just for laughs. What started out as a silly game turned into what is now a standing tradition. We immediately uploaded it to Facebook with the title being:
Baby Thespians Theatre Presents: Mother Teresa, Aunt Jemima, Bad-Ass Biker Babe & The Surgeon
It was such fun, and our friends and family enjoyed it so much, that we constantly look for household props to adorn the kids with for silly photos. I know for a fact that these photos will land in their school yearbooks, their wedding videos, and will haunt them for the rest of their lives. This, we're counting on. At the very least, I know we will be able to wallpaper the walls of our retirement home with them when our kids disown us for making spectacles of them at such a tender young age.
If you were to stoop outside our windows with your ear pressed to the panes, you'd likely hear me singing ridiculous songs that I made up on the fly just because my kids love to hear me sing, and - dare I say - I'm rather good at it, as long as it's not a serious performance. I have many songs I remember from childhood, like the good old mainstays Itsy Bitsy Spider, Twinkle Twinkle Little Star and The Wheels on the Bus - and my kids love these songs, don't get me wrong - but after about the 15th time you've belted it out with the accompanying hand motions - it gets really old. Have you ever noticed that a lot of the antiquated Nursery Rhymes are actually very sinister and macabre? London Bridge collapsing, the baby plummeting to it's demise from the treetops due to that breaking bough, kids voluntarily falling down into ashes with pockets full of ... what?! They're just not the feelgood vibe I'm shooting for, so I tend to avoid those like the plague, which ironically is what children in the dark ages kept pockets of posies to ward off. Instead, I've bastardized my own versions of childhood songs to either fit the moment, the activity, and sometimes just for the hell of it. Some of mom's twisted lyrics go as follows:
(Sung to the tune of Farmer in the Dell, this is a song my son has enjoyed at each diaper change ever since he was a newborn, to present day)
Powder on my nuts!
Powder on my nuts!
Momma's gonna put some .... powder-on-my-nuts!
(This next one was adapted from the nursery rhyme titled Peas Porridge Hot, and it is reserved for those inexplicably, eye-watering, nose-pinching dirty diaper changes that would otherwise be a miserable, much-loathed undertaking*)
Poo Diaper Hot!
Poo Diaper Cold!
Poo Diaper on your butt, nine days old!
Some like it hot!
Some like it cold!
Some like it on their butts, nine days old!
*can also be adapted to a pee diaper, but I've become such a pro at removing/wiping/changing those that we're barely afforded the time and luxury of a serenade.
I don't kid myself into thinking that I wouldn't be committed by court order if a sane person heard me belt out these ridiculous tunes, but ask me if I care! I most assuredly do not. The kids dig it, I dig it, and as long as we're all enjoying ourselves, I'll fight rehabilitation from my personal brand of crazy tooth and nail. Of course, I don't manipulate ALL lyrics to ALL the songs we sing. There's also all the theme songs and jingles from their favorite shows on BabyFirstTV, and those can't be modified or amended, else the kids will know. They have memorized those song lyrics, and they know if you try to cut it short, or forget the lyrics. You can bet that they'll call you out on it in one hot, quick minute if you dare try to alter it. Because they know. Be warned.
As a relatively new parent, I naively swan-dived into the rock-your-child-to-sleep trap that other parenting n00bs fall victim to before they realize it sets a very cumbersome ritual that is hell to break from. As a newborn, my son got that luxury. With the twins, we knew better than to ever go there. During our practice run with my son, I put many, many miles on that glider rocker while trying to lull him to sleep on the swell of my pregnant belly with my fat, water-retaining crankles propped up on the ottoman to help balance the weight, since my legs would usually fall asleep before my son would. I only knew a handful of nursery rhyme songs at the time, so after the first fifteen minutes, I'd run out of material. But I improvised, and my son's ears were christened with just about every genre of MY favorite music - from Ray Charles to Nirvana to Metallica and the Foo Fighters. My husband didn't think it was weird at all that I slowed down Master of Puppets a few dozen beats to accommodate a sleepy child. Nor did he think it was odd to hear me singing the sanguine or angst-filled lyrics by a dead rockstar who no longer topped the charts. For the longest time, the 5-disk CD changer in my Jeep held only one CD that was a medley of Elvis Christmas Tunes that my sweet husband burned for me one winter. If my son remembers one thing about me, I hope it's that his mother could impersonate Elvis like a pro. We spent nearly every one of those first car rides straight into the spring and summer with that CD on full blast, singing about Blue Christmases.
My husband and I made a promise to one another that we'd never pimp our kids out on YouTube, no matter how great the content, but for Facebook friends and family, we'd share in our daughter's favorite game of wearing bloomers on their head. My husband and I aren't above wearing them, either. Don't judge. They were inarguably enjoying themselves, and that is apparent by their big grins and sparkly eyes:
Our son is, always has been, and always will be a big giant ham, and he revels in dressing up in anything other than actual clothes, and it's ALWAYS better to ride around the house on your trike with a monkey hanging from the steering column:
There is absolutely nothing my kids enjoy more than when Dad gets down on the floor with them and serves as their personal climbing structure. My husband no doubt curses the decision to replace our soft, plush carpet with hardwood floors, but hey - you live, you learn. Don't be fooled, though - creaky knees be damned, I'm sure this activity ranks right up there for him with the Superbowl, E3, and riding the Harley Davidson he so selflessly sold to help supplement funds when we decided I was going to quit my job to be a stay-at-home Mom. In my book, there is nothing sexier than an ex-biker romping on the floor with his kids:
We hope that when our kids are older, they won't be too traumatized by the amount of photos we took of them in precarious positions, wearing silly outfits, with ridiculous looks on their faces that just SCREAMED to be captioned. Who can resist photographing your twin daughter's first bikinis? Not us. We hope they never struggle with weight issues and blame this photo on their predicament. It's just that chubby babies are awesome, the more rolls, the merrier, and so on and so forth:
I'm sure we're not in the minority when it comes to parents being silly with their kids. I would venture a guess that kids bring out the silliness in most everyone they influence, because after all - who can resist making a child laugh and seeing their eyes light up? My view is that at the end of the day, if the housework, laundry, mess-sweeping, spill-blotting, booger-picking, butt-wiping blues have been cancelled out by the great fun you had with your children, then I call it a win/win for all parties involved. I pity the children whose parents greedily dole out laughs on an occasional-only basis, and I weep for those parents who are so stingy with their time due to their own personal agendas that they miss out on the delightful gratification of entertaining their kids while the kids are still young enough to worship them as not only their main provider and benefactor, but also their bestest friends.
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