Too Much Elmo?

You know you and your 20 month old child have too many Elmo books, have been watching too much Sesame Street, and have one twelve too many Elmo toys when...

...your son learned to say "Elmo" shortly after "mama", "dada", and "ball" (thanks to the plentiful toys).  

...your son then learned to say "Ernie", "Bert", "Bigba", and "Cooka" before he learned to say the names of his siblings.

...your son says all of the above references about a thousand times a day.

...you are watching a commercial for Advair and you finally realize why that actress telling you about her asthma looks so familiar: she's Elmo's pal "Gina".

...you occasionally have trouble sleeping during the night because the theme song to "Elmo's World" is cycling through your mind like a psychotic episode-inducing broken record.

...one of the reasons that the theme song from "Elmo's World" is going through your head at all hours of the day is that your son has learned to sing (I use that word liberally) "la la la Elmo waaaad".

Pretty soon I'll be having dreams that Maria and Luis are my mom and dad and Gabi is my sister, we have a goldfish named Dorothy and we live next door to Mr. Noodle.  And we'll all be singing "Elmo's World" in Spanish.  

What?  You don't know who all those people are?

Someone make it stop.

Brain Power...Or Lack Thereof

It only took me a little over a year to re-learn the fact that babies like to be entertained.

Here I was thinking I was covering all the bases by feeding him, keeping him warm and safe, and giving him lots of love. And along comes my son, beating us over the head with this lesson. With a plastic spoon.

We were eating lunch at the café at our athletic club the other day. My husband met us there after his work-out. Shortly after placing our son in the high chair, it becomes clear he has no interest in eating lunch. No matter what we put in front of him he tries to climb and claw his way out, aiming straight for daddy.

His preference for my husband has become more and more clear lately, but I’m still keeping a stiff upper lip. I know the love is in there; he just prefers the parent that will pick him up all the time. He smells weakness.

Okay, maybe my upper lip is starting to quiver a little.

We are trying our best to appease our son and keep him in the high chair, mostly because my husband doesn’t want to muss up his work shirt. After his work-out, he showered and put back on his work clothes. BIG mistake. Eat lunch with baby first, THEN put on clean clothes and go back to work.

Eventually we take him out of the high chair and my husband tries keeping him on his lap while eating a burrito. Wet slobber marks are finding their way to his shirt and the rice and beans aren’t far behind. Now daddy is running out of patience.

We try giving the baby more grilled cheese sandwich, thinking he must be hungry. No luck. Then I try holding him, but again, he ain’t happy.

Finally my husband declares “I gotta run.” Granted it was going to be a short lunch anyway, but our son’s neediness just shortened the visit further. Now I’m losing the only adult company I’ll have all day. Bummer.

I pick my son up off daddy’s lap and we say good-bye. He’s hollering in my arms and I think ‘I should just walk him around a little’. Right in that moment I realize that I should walk him over to the place with the plastic spoons and forks.

I grab a couple of spoons and hand them over. My son puts one in each hand and a huge smile spreads across his face.

He bangs them on the table, mouths them, and practically hugs them and gives them each a pet name. He walks around the café, still with one in each hand, showing them off to all the other lunch-eating folks.

These two spoons then make their way to Target with us, gripped firmly in two happy hands, banging around the stroller.

Then they continue their joy ride all the way back home, where my son proceeds to show them around the house.

He even introduces them to his favorite canine treat, trying to use one of the spoons to scoop up some dog food.

Clever little dog-food-loving boy.

Clearly more clever than mommy and daddy.

Duh. Plastic spoons.

These were a major part of our repertoire with child #1. That and empty water bottles. And of course actual toys.

But since we haven’t really been out to an eating establishment much since we became a party of five, this nugget of knowledge slipped right out the back door of my brain while I was answering the front door with reading lessons and time-outs for the girls.

I’m beginning to see that with each child my husband’s and my brains further morph into post-parenting pulp. We seem to get overly absorbed by the children that can actually hold conversations and forget about the baby.

Although, can you call it a conversation when the main topic is either Hannah Montana or a story with a hundred utterances of the word “poopy” sprinkled with a healthy dose of giggles? Regardless, those children that can actually say “MOM, DAD, LOOK AT ME!” have sapped so much of our attention and brain power that we have to resort to just our survival instincts with the baby.

Of course, just when we finally re-learn all our lessons and get it in gear with him, he’ll be on to the next stage, with or without us. Mostly without us.

I guess we can only hope that we will succeed in steering our children through this maze of life, educating and empowering them to explore and discern their own path of discovery when they leave our shelter.

Which means that by the time our son goes to off to college, we will have become mush-brained mutants in E-Z chair loungers fighting over the remote.