Rent A Toddler: a Solution for Everyone

Rent a Toddler

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After my 8 billionth sleepless night, I’ve finally decided to go ahead and implement one of my less robust business ideas: Rent a Toddler.

Need an excuse to justify your age inappropriate love of trick-or- treating? Consider Rent a Toddler.

Need an exercise regimen that ensures that you never ever get to sit down ever again? Rent a Toddler has the workout for you.

Want someone to decorate your walls with permanent marker and peanut butter (or the occasional sundry body excretion)? Tired of all the predictable emotions and long for the company of someone who will melt your heart with love and cuddles one second, only to have you debating whether you should call animal control or a priest after you give them the wrong color popsicle? Or maybe you’re tired of sitting by and wondering what it’s like to be awoken every two hours with a round house kick to your jugular.

Wonder no more- Rent a Toddler has your solution to all these challenges and more!

F̶o̶r̶ ̶l̶e̶s̶s̶ ̶t̶h̶a̶n̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶p̶r̶i̶c̶e̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶a̶ ̶g̶y̶m̶ ̶m̶e̶m̶b̶e̶r̶s̶h̶i̶p̶ ̶ FREE, available to g̶o̶o̶d̶ ̶l̶o̶v̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶h̶o̶m̶e̶s̶ ANYONE WHO’LL TAKE HIM FOR A FEW HOURS, you too can have a toddler.

Call today!
Right Now!
Please?!?!

**Legal disclaimer:  if you have Tiffany stemware, expensive furniture, dry clean only clothes, a vibrant love or social life, ambition of any kind, or any desire to cling to your sanity, Rent a Toddler may not be for you.

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No Self-Imposed Limitations In This House

Born In A Mansion

While I’ll be the first to admit that I can be a control freak of a mother, there’s actually a lot of things that may bother other moms that I just couldn’t care less about. I celebrate kid-inspired mismatched outfits and random sock pairings. I think it’s great when they push all the buttons in the elevator, cause you know, adventure. Spic and span my house is not. Being able to play every sport and instrument; never going to happen.

But there is one behavior that I just cannot abide in my children: self-imposed limitations.

There is one expression that I simply will not allow my children to say, and unfortunately it’s one that I hear a lot at this stage of development. “I can’t do it”. “I can’t do it”, a phrase that comes with floppy limbs and high pitches and is usually expressed as if auditioning for a Victorian Melodrama. My kneejerk response is always the same “In this house we say ‘I CAN do it, I just need a little help’ “. And then I work with the floppy protagonist on doing it together (even if I’m doing 90% of the work- 10% still counts as not getting off the hook).

Richard Bach so sagely wrote, “Argue for your limitations, and sure enough they are yours.” I explain to the boys that if they tell themselves they cannot do something, they surely can’t.

And why am I so uptight about this? After all, it’s definitely easier to just do something for them than to have this perpetual conversation and to assist them with the task at hand for the zillionth time. In part it was because I was raised with the same empowered ethos, with a mother who sold encyclopedias and handed me the relevant volume and a cursory “look in up” whenever I asked her any question at all (back in the pedagogical dark ages before Google gave us light). A family of Montessorians who believed in executive function and child empowerment. But I will tell you flat out where it does not come from- my own conquering of self-limitations. No way, Jose. Quite the contrary.

On a good day, I can tell you without hesitation that my insistence that my children reframe their capabilities from the spirit of defeat to the spirit of possibility is that I am trying really hard to demobilize my own self-limitation and I don’t want them to struggle like I have. That I have spent a lot of years arguing for my limitation a if it were the air I breathed. We teach what we want to learn, after all, and my poor children are my captive guinea pigs for continual brain tattooing of all the lessons that I’m trying to learn myself. The truth is, I beat back a steady stream of “I can’ts” in my own mind every day. “I can’t do that. I’m too old”. “I can’t do that, I’m too inexperienced” “I can’t do that, it didn’t work when I tried” “I can’t do that, it’s all been done before” Etc ad nasuem. The melodrama in my own mind has been quite something.

I can’t for the life of me remember who said this first (and here even Google AND World Book fail me- if you know the attribute, kindly credit it in comments below), but I remember exactly where I was when I first heard: “You Were Born Into A Mansion. Why Do you Insist on Living in One Room”. This idea that expansion and abundance is our birthright, yet we shutter ourselves into a very small experience through our own self-imposed limitations.

Surely, you’ve heard of the experiment of the tank of goldfish that was divided in two by a glass partition for several months, keeping the goldfish relegated to only a portion of the expansive tank. After several months, the glass was removed, but the goldfish never attempted to swim beyond the past barrier, prisoners by their own past conditioning. And these are creatures with like a five second memory, where every day is truly a new one. Imagine what we’re all up against, us with our lives of perpetual slings and arrows. It’s no wonder why we all stay cramped up in a tiny room in our own potential mansions. It’s no wonder we tell ourselves there is no other alternative than the comfort of our own self-enforced limitations.

But I want my kids to have better. I want them to be better defended against the sea of CAN’TS, both internal and external. At the very least, I want them to at least have the defense of a mantra that their unreasonable and unyielding mother drilled into their pudding heads. “I CAN do it, I just need a little help”. So when life starts presenting them bigger obstacles than spreading peanut butter on crumbly bread or pulling off a tight jacket, they will at least have a moment to consider the possibility of their own potential in the situation. That they might feel comfortable looking for help to get to the next step rather than throwing in the towel altogether (as I myself have done so many times).

And at the very least, maybe just maybe it will give me less work to do, too.

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Random Acts of Advent

Random Acts Advent 2015

 

A few weeks ago, I saw a Random Acts of Kindness Advent Calendar on Facebook, and we immediately stole the idea and ran with it. I absolutely love this- every day you count down to Christmas with the kids by doing something kind for someone else. Every day is a new random act that we do together.

We’ve always done advent with the boys, who up to now have really only grasped one undeniable thing about Advent; Chocolate. We weren’t sure how to infuse some value into that chocolate, until now. How meaningful it is to connect an inspired activity to the spirit of the holiday.

Even though we’ve been doing different acts each day, I actually hesitated to share this as a blog post. I believe that the biggest reward for doing good can be internal, and sometimes there’s power in doing kind things anonymously. I don’t want to teach my kids that we do good things only to tell others about it or turn it into a self-gratifying social media share.

That said, I myself wouldn’t have thought about doing this in our family if someone else hadn’t shared it and given me the idea, and I’m delighted at how much my boys are getting into doing it. So if a gratuitous share helps, here are my kids doing some awesome things lately:

Taping Money to vending machine
Taping dollar to a vending machine
Teaching kids kindness
Cooking for a friend
Kids feeding birds
Feeding the birds

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Each morning they run to their calendars and say “What’s our advent for today?”. They really look forward to doing them, and have fun with each one. A kind compliment to a friend. Taping a dollar to a vending machine when no one’s looking. Sending a letter to a soldier. Feeding the birds. Helping a neighbor. They are now looking forward to the good feelings they get when they do these things. In fact, they’re enjoying it so much that they’re adding their own kindness ideas onto the calendar.

If you haven’t already seen this, here’s a great example to use with your family from Coffee Cups and Crayons:

2015 Kindness Advent Kids

So grateful we saw this and put it to practice. I’d love to know how you teach your kids to practice kindness throughout the year. Please feel free to share your practices in the comments!

Random Acts Advent 2015

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How Fragile We Are

How Fragile we are

This morning I sat alone in tears, suddenly overcome with so much sadness with all the hard things happening in the world. There was so much to grieve in an aching world, I barely knew where to start. So much ugliness, fear, hatred, exploitation and harming one another. There are so  many things that I can’t yet talk to you boys about in your littleness and precious innocence, and sometimes I get so scared about what lies ahead for you. In fact, the sadness and the fear are sometimes so great that I can’t even look at it directly, for fear it might consume me.

Like most people, I want to be able to DO something about all the awful in the world, all the hurting and suffering. And in the smallest and humblest of ways this blog is that something. Mothering you both is that something. Showing up and trying to be kind to everyone I meet is that something. These things aren’t grandiose, but it’s becoming ever more apparent that simply being kind to one another and to ourselves can be a radical rebellion.

My goal as a mother is to raise you both to be lovers of the world, to be able to connect with people across beliefs and cultures and geographies and economics. To give you the values that I was so friggin lucky to raised with by my own parents and my sister: tolerance and respect and love and peace and generosity and kindness. To raise other people up rather than tear them down. To do your best to release judgment and to love what is. To take care of one another.

And I was crying this morning not only because of grief over how those values don’t always seem apparent in the world. But I was crying over how I don’t always live them in my own life, and how I’m often awful and nasty to those I love. How I have to be reminded again and again to be kind to myself. It’s often so much easier to be loving and kind and forgiving to other people than it is to be to ourselves.

What I want you to know, my little ones, is that in order to be gentle with the world you must first be so very gentle with yourself. You must be fierce in the protection of your own heart, and be vigilant to always carve out space to nurture yourself in a world that seems to be demanding and distracting away from that nurturing instinct. As I learned so many years back in my flight attendant days- you are the most important person on the airplane. Secure those oxygen masks, guys. You’ve got to take care of yourself first before or else all your beautiful values will be for naught.

You’re calling from the other room, and I’m going to take you swimming in the ocean now, to smile and laugh and probably get irritated at you when you don’t listen or when you take too long. We’ll go about our routine. This tender part of my aching heart won’t be visible to you today- it really wants to close off altogether. But today I’m making a promise to do my very best to keep my own heart open and to love myself like crazy so I can teach you both to do the same. I promise that as long as I’m able, I’m going to hold your hands as you grow into an inevitable understanding of The Awful Things We Do To One Another, and to do everything I can to radically shape you into brave forces of love and kindness. For all of our sakes, because this world so desperately needs you to grow into love.

Found Family and Other Gratitudes

Found family

Every morning, the boys and I say one thing we are grateful for over breakfast. So when Thanksgiving rolls around, the things we’re grateful for roll out pretty easily. The amount of things we have to be grateful for is admittidly ridiculous, and our list this year included things we wouldn’t have even thought to count this same time last year:

-the Ocean
-Publix
-our cozy Surfside house
-yearlong flip flops and sun dresses
-Liam’s Mad Reading Skills
-Quinlan’s love of language
-Bill’s new office and short commute
-Florida orange juice and fresh seafood
-Ocean Reef Academy
-the Community Center
-Grand Beach Hotel
-St Augustine and the pirates

But what made me particularly grateful was the list of people we are grateful for that we didn’t even know a few months ago: Miss Maricela, Miss Kristen, and Miss Anna, our kind new landlord Dean, who probably has renter PTSD from all the things we’ve needed fixed, Bill’s new co-workers, my new Sister Goddess friends, and all the new friends from Church by the Sea and beyond. In fact, one of our new nearest and dearest, Miss Rosaly, and her beautiful mother joined us for our Thanksgiving dinner. Rosaly captured Liam and Quinn’s hearts from day one, and became a fast friend to me. No one watching the six of us at Thanksgiving dinner would believe that these two beautiful Brasilian women aren’t actually lifelong friends of ours, or even related to us. And we were grateful for the lesson that family is found everywhere, and that while people may physically come and go from us, our heart has no limit to how many people it can hold. Excited to see who we have to be grateful for next year.

Liam the reader

Saint Augustine, Florida

Running down the historic St George Street

Before the boys were born, Bill and I lived in Old Town Alexandria, Virginia. The third oldest and probably the largest historic district in the country (per Alexandria’s website anyway). Since our first date was on a history tour in a graveyard, I think it’s safe to say that we are history lovers, and we savored every moment of walking down cobblestone streets, living in an 8 foot wide house (you heard me right, eight feet wide), and telling people George Washington may have/most likely had his wig powdered in my living room. But that’s a story for another day. The meaty bit here is that when we were living in Old Town, we often talked about what life must be like in those even OLDER towns. Someday, we swore, we’d make a pilgrimage to the mecca for history nerds like us, Saint Augustine.


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Having newly moved to Miami and thinking up ways to celebrate Bill’s 40th birthday, all those “somedays” came haunting and the boys and I immediately made plans to check out Historic Saint Augustine, just about five hours north along the Atlantic coast. We made it a surprise for Bill, who after the fifth hour in the car just figured we were going to another of our favorites, Savannah, GA. Much to the boys’ delight, Grandpa Stu and Sassy dog, who were picking up a boat a few hours away, ended up joining us for the adventure.

Suffice, it was love at first sight. The narrow old streets, the eclectic blends of Spanish and British colonial buildings, and the ancient fort that greatest us made instantly overjoyed. And the boys were particularly excited about our accomadations at the Pirate Haus Inn, with its pirate toys and pirate pancakes like icing on the cake. They even wore their jolly roger shorts for the occasion.

Pirate Haus Inn FullSizeRender (11) IMG_6609

 

We spent the first day exploring and enjoying the town. We were told that it the town would be uncharacteristically packed as that Saturday was the lighting of the holiday lights around the historic district, so forget about moving the car. And if was packed indeed. Fortunately, Quinlan did his habitual ridiculous early rising, so he and I ventured out in the wee hours to do some tourist-less exploring. The town was abandoned and enchanted at that early hour, and it we had a fun time pretending it really was the 1700s. Well I did anyway; I think Quinlan just enjoyed being able to run down St George St nonstop without being yelled at or corralled.

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Apart from getting absolutely drenched by rain for a few hours, the most salient highlights of the trip was twofold: the gorgeous garden of the Crucial Coffee Cafe (oh my goodness I LOVE this spot and want to recreate every inch of it in my backyard!) and Flagler College. Flagler College was a gamechanger for Bill and I as parents, because up until seeing that place, we always figured we were pretty accepting parents who would let our children make their own decisions. But no longer. They are both now REQUIRED to go to Flagler College. End of discussion. For history nerds like us, that has got to be one of the coolest colleges in the country. They WILL eat their cafeteria food amidst millions of dollars of Tiffany glass if it’s the last thing we do as parents.

Crucial Coffee Company Flagler College

As soon as we got home, the first thing Bill and I did was search out and immediately start Freebasing every bit of history we could find about Flagler and Saint Augustine. And while I still will always love Old Town Alexandria best, the boys and all agreed that it was pretty impressive to spend some time in our nation’s oldest city. And to sleep with the pirates, no less!

 

Miami Children’s Museum

Children's Museum

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For Liam’s fifth birthday, we were gifted a membership to the Miami Children’s Museum from Granpa Stu and Grammy Paige, and immediately put it to good use yesterday. Pulling into the parking lot, we saw the huge cruise ships in the bay and the boys were beside themselves with excitement for the day’s adventure. And for good reason- the Miami Children’s Museum is so much fun!
Children's Museum
We started with a Greenhouse energy efficiency exhibit (which was strangely the coolest thing either boy had ever seen so they kept coming back here). Then- my favorite- the boys decorated starfish and sharks, then uploaded them to the digital aquarium that played on the wall. We all delighted in seeing our little creatures swimming around with our names on them.

Quinn at Children's museum

Hours passed learning about money, dressing up as firefighters, and fishing for magnetic fish before it was finally time to go. Meltdowns were evident and Quinlan fell and split his lip while doing the Limbo on the Carnival Cruise ship exhibit, hopefully not too portentous of our future fate on cruise ships.

One tip for future reference- the only onsight food is an overcrowded and underwhelming Subway, and after waiting in line forever you’d be lucky to get a place to sit down in the teeny tiny dining area (clearly designed by the same sadistic person who brought us the one woman bathroom stall at a Katy Perry concert). Bring snacks or even a picnic lunch to feed your littles (and bug spray).

 

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Before the Halloween Races

Halloween window decals

The Day of all Days- Halloween is here! Hooray! The day isn’t even half way over, but we’ve already had so much fun and gone through three costumes and three Halloween parties. I don’t want to say we’re Halloweened out.. cause NEVER…

Easy Toilet Paper Mummies Halloween2 Halloween3 Halloween4

 

Wonderful World

Pumpkintopia

Pumpkintopia

Oh man- how we love this time of year. I am so delighted that Liam and Quinlan share my absolute knee-shaking adoration of Halloween. The make-believe, the creativity, the sweet sultry slip into fall, the treats, the magic….and last but certainly not least: ALL THINGS PUMPKIN! Yes yes yes, the pumpkin spice lattes, but also the pumpkin raviolis, the pumpkin soup, the pumpkin pasta. It’s as if we’ve died and gone to heaven.

Pumpkintopia

Today, to celebrate our own bachannal pumpkin love, we doubled up and made pumpkin milkshakes while we carved our pumpkins and roasted our seeds. True bliss.

The pumpkin milkshake was easy. Here’s what we used:

Ingredients

1 cup vanilla ice cream
¾ cup milk
½ cup pure pumpkin (canned is okay, but not pumpkin pie filling)
1/2 tsp nutmeg
1/2 tsp cinnamon
lots of enthusiasm

Just threw it into the blender and voila:

Pumpkin Milkshake

 

Look at the little men getting into the action, Liam with a full body pumpkin scoop technique, and Quinlan with his usual excavation of the fridge (and subsequent disappearance- where’s Quinlan?

Lost in the Fridge

 

Later today it’s all costume parades and Halloween parties, but for this blissful hour it’s a full on tribute to our endless love of the pumpkin! And while these two clean up, I’m going to sit back and eat both these trays of pumpkin seeds. Believe it.

pumpkin seeds