Summer of 2016, Part One

Think you’re busy?  Read this.

This week and next week enjoy this guest post from my brother Scott.  He and his wife Priscilla have six children, with the oldest now 7 years old.  Scott is an accountant who works as a business consultant for various central Wisconsin companies.  I believe I got permission to share this.  At least he didn’t say I couldn’t!

Summer of 2016

by Scott Hoover

Part One

People say life comes at you in stages. You don’t start parenting with five children.  First you have one and shudder to imagine what it would be like to have three.  Then you have three and that feels doable but now you gape in disbelief at people with eight.  And so on.

People also say no matter how big a family gets, the most difficult point is three children. That is where you have to switch from one-on-one defense to more of a zone approach.  Plus, none of your children are old enough to help with the work.  After you get past three children, the oldest take over the chores and help raise the younger ones, so it goes much better.

Under these pleasant delusions I entered the summer of 2016 in confidence. Yes, we’d just had Violet, our sixth baby.  Yes, we had 2-year-old twin boys.  Yes, our oldest child was only six.  But our ship was on its way out of the stormy gales into the shallows of the glorious middle years.

In looking back, I wouldn’t say it all fell apart in one catastrophic shipwreck. More it was like riding a battered boat that sputters and finally dies at sea.  In the end you can’t be certain what did it in, but it is clear you are adrift far from land.

Violet’s arrival in April is when the motor started knocking. She isn’t a bad baby, but she takes Priscilla away from the other five.  That is huge.

We get home from church in the evening and Priscilla needs to feed Violet. That leaves me with five children to manage.  Brad and Alyssa (now 7 and 5, respectively) can PJ themselves but it doesn’t happen on autopilot.  David is “drifty” (a fitting word I heard recently) and has the uncanny ability to get ready for bed for a solid 10 minutes and barely even have his shirt off when I come up with the twins.

Yes, the twins. The first step to getting them in PJs is to authoritatively say “Come to the bathroom”.  When that fails, you round them up (both or one) and get started.  It is dead weight work from start to finish, especially at the end of a long day or an evening away.  You grab one, take off his clothes, take him potty, try to find his PJs, take a time out to stop the other twin from rubbing his hands on the toilet bowl while he waits his turn, at which point the first one is running around the living room with very little attire.  You eventually find some PJs, grab the first twin the living room, and finally, finally one twin is totally ready for bed.

Then you repeat, unless you calculate that you would be ahead to get the prepared twin into bed, before you start on the second one. Part of the calculation of course must include how much trouble you will need to mop up when you come back to PJ the unattended twin.  You should also assume that while you’re putting the first twin to bed you will notice David on the bedroom floor, with only his church pants off and say “David, do you understand what Dad means when he says get ready for bed?” David will look at you with a hurt serious look that says “Dad can’t you see how much effort went into to taking my pants off?”

Eventually, almost impossibly, they will all be in bed, all five. It’s like herding cats to get that far, and when they are all in, you are still not done.  Getting the last one into bed is the cue for everyone to starting talking to Dad to delay bedtime as long as possible.

“Dad, how kind are mom cows?”

“Dad, my stomach is itchy”.

Or from the twins, a guttural “uuggg, uuggg”, which means their first hug wasn’t good enough.

There may even be someone who magically needs to go potty again. David probably left his favorite teddy downstairs and needs to go get it.

Finally, Dad says that’s it, it’s time to be quiet. Someone starts sobbing because they had a very important thought Dad has mercilessly crushed.

“Okay,” Dad says, “but this is the last question”.

Then Dad slinks away as fast as possible. As he passes down the stairs under Alyssa’s bedroom, he is reminded of the night this winter when she called down, “Dad, you forgot to say that you love me.”  Indeed, what possibly could be happening to Dad that he could forget something like that!

In the quiet that hopefully follows, Dad crashes on the recliner. There is no energy to catch up on the things that could be done when the house is quiet.  Dad goes into survival sleep or low-energy reading, grazing on rest while he can.

Violet may have set the engine knocking, but if we look for the pivotal moment when the knocking switched from a minor nuisance to the sound of impending catastrophe, we look no further than the twin’s second birthday. As the twins surged into spring and hit the two mark, Priscilla and I had the general awareness we may have met our match.

Two 2-year-olds are not twice the trouble of one. I’d say at least thrice.  Collectively they will combine wit and power to destroy everything and everyone.  They will wear you down until you break.

I could point to the time they got into the fresh strawberry bowl and started a strawberry war on the dining room carpet. I could point to the dominoes in the toilet (well only one for sure, but several are missing).  I could point to a giraffe in the toilet. There was the time Priscilla left two brownies on the counter and went upstairs.  When she came back, there were merely crumbs and a boy with bulging cheeks.

There is a hole in the plaster of our living room wall where the door handle punched through (probably the twins). One evening, Priscilla found the twins standing cautiously around the hole.  When she asked what happened, they said “Phone. Mom phone”.  Yes, indeed, one of the family phones was down the hole, deep in the wall, never to be seen again.

There was the time Priscilla left a large bag of baking M&Ms on the counter then went to bathe Violet. The twins pulled in a small stool, climbed up and sent the M&Ms spraying across the kitchen floor.

They made a game of throwing fresh peppers down the basement stairs. They drew on the couch with markers and hauled cereal boxes (with cereal in them) out by the machine shed.  They emptied the dish soap on the kitchen floor.  They enjoyed a game of throwing rocks at the calves.

They start laughing in glee when they do these things. When that laugh drifts in through open windows or doorways Priscilla says “Oh no” real fast and quiet, and runs to the scene.

Another contribution to the slow shipwreck was our dog, Oreo. We got her so the children wouldn’t be afraid of dogs….

…to be concluded next week!

And in the meantime, one thing that’s kept me “busy”…my other brother’s set of twins at my house last night, and a birthday party for their brother Josh who turned three today.  Cousin Daniel and youngest brother Sean were present as well.