My most vivid parenting memories often don't get captured on film. Carrie and Melina got their first taste of caffeine this week, which I can only assume is to blame for my calmest child's wild eyes.
Thursday morning Devon ran around the corner and shouted to me: "We need to get some more paper in here!" It wasn't his words that made me jump from my chair and run to see what he wanted. As I learned last week, Devon gets flustered in emergencies and says things that you wouldn't expect because he can't make the right words come out. When he uses a certain tone of voice I drop what I'm doing.
I followed him into the kitchen and found Carrie and Melina crouched over a used coffee filter they had just dug out of the garbage. They were grabbing fistfuls of the grounds and lifting them to their mouths to taste, eyes round with discovery. As you can imagine, I ran for a wet towel instead of the camera. I pinned one twin between my knees and held the other on my lap as I swabbed out their mouths, shucked off their crumbly sleepers, and wiped their stained fingers.
Devon got treats for helping Mommy protect his sisters. He sat on the coffee table lining up his five M&M's and eating them one by one. I could see the thoughts running through his mind. So... if the babies do things they're not supposed to and I tell Mommy, I get treats? This "big brother" thing could turn out to be a pretty good gig!
Devon's favorite word this week is "treat". He's learning how to eat a fruit pop without making his mouth too cold and always begging for a sip of Mommy's tea.
Ahhh, I wish a fruit pop was all it took to make everyone feel that good.
Devon shouts "Pizza!" every time we pull into the Sam's Club parking lot. He knows my weaknesses. I'm such a sucker for sitting on a little plastic table and serving him pieces of questionably nutritious food as a part of my weekly shopping ritual. It's just so easy to hustle him right into the house and down for a nap when he's full and drowsy from the hypnotic ride home instead of putting away the groceries, drawing out the ritual of dinner, and getting out the wet rag and broom to clean up the inevitable mess on the floor.
The other reason we're such big fans of Sam's Club is the double-passenger carts. My diaper runs to Target have been pretty hectic lately as I try to keep two unbelted girls from standing up.
We get a lot of comments on the adorable way their feet hang out of the cart in a jumble. Melina (left) is wearing the white shoes with the bright pink bottoms.
We observe Syrup Saturdays a few times a month. Devon picks away at his pancake, digging out blueberries like a strip miner. Slurries of syrup and flecks of pancake slop down the sides of his Big Boy Booster and end up on the floor.
"I found a ball!" he says for each one, breaking them so they stain his teeth and fingers with black juice. It's amazing how much of my day is spent on food: going to the store to buy it, putting it away in the kitchen, getting it out, preparing it, serving it, and cleaning it off the walls, floor, and dishes.
The hard part of parenting is not that it takes all day and sometimes all night. It's the number of tasks you're expected to accomplish effectively at once. Yesterday, Devon flung his spoon on the ground just for the pleasure of asking me politely to pick it up for him. I unstrapped him and told him to get it himself and looked up in time to see Melina arching her back in another attempt to climb out of her high chair and a bored Carrie deciding to remove her clothes. I felt a tug on my leg and heard a voice say "Go potty! Get treats!" The fifteen seconds it took to unstrap the girls and put them in a safe place were unfortunately too long for Devon to wait. The ten minutes it took to change Devon's clothes and clean the mess off the floor was long enough for a hundred tiny Florida ants to find the mug of baby cereal on the kitchen table and go nuts. The minute it took to wipe up the ants was all it took Carrie and Melina to make it to the kitchen garbage and find the coffee filter.
I don't think people like to admit that they're struggling with a pest problem because it implies shoddy housekeeping. I do my best to clean up after everybody after breakfast, lunch, snackies, and dinner. I wipe the counters twenty times a day. I make Devon pick up all his dropped food and put it in the garbage after every meal, watching to keep him from deciding to slip a stray Cheerio into his mouth.
Every ant in Citrus Springs has still decided that stopping by my kitchen to cruise the leavings on the walls, floor, and counters is a more reliable source of food than waiting around near the sidewalks for dead bugs and dropped ice cream cones.
A month ago, Craig came back from Home Depot with some ant bait. I don't even get emotional anymore when I think of the ants feeding our poison to their children and dying in agony. This is war. It's either us or them.
Since it's Craig's job as a researcher to control insects without harming humans, he knows which bait will keep the pesky bugs away without risking harm to anybody else that happens to be crawling around the floor. We're now on our fourth preparation, some of which he mixed up in our kitchen. None of them have been able to keep the ants at bay for more than a few days. I find ever more creative places to store our food and they outsmart me every time. I even caught them crawling into the microwave to find the leftover breakfast rolls.
Even with all of his knowledge, Craig's best advice to me was pretty simple:
"Ants are attracted to food. No food, no ants. If we want a clean, ant-free kitchen, we have to pretend like we're trying to keep bears away from our campsite. Every crumb of food and every sticky spill needs to be cleaned up and wiped immediately."
Wow. Easier said than done.
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