What children do behind your back

Now, where did I put that wrapper...

Whoever coined the phrase “never a dull moment” must have looked into the future and seen my kids. My husband and I, we like boring. Boring is good. But boring doesn’t live at our house. Not a week goes by that some mini-crisis doesn’t occur that throws the whole family into a tailspin, causing us to wonder whether everybody else’s children are this weird, ‘why us’, and what’s next.

I do know there are other parents who have experienced the explode-a-kid: you ask them for something innocent (put on your coat, brush your hair) and complete pandemonium ensues. Screaming, throwing objects, crying; you’d think you’d done something awful like cutting off Barbie’s head or taking a blowtorch to their dollhouse. The worst thing about these disproportionate anger attacks is that you can’t see them coming; one minute everything’s fine, the next your day is ruined and you feel like grabbing a bottle of rum and hiding in the broom closet for the next three hours.

I believe the reason children are so unpredictable is that they have a daily itinerary only they know about. You may think it’s a quarter to twelve and time to put on their coat, but to them, it’s 11:44:08; the moment they were planning to space off and pick their nose a bit. You can look at the clock and decide it’s almost 7 pm and time for dinner; to them, it’s 6:49:19: the exact time during which they need to switch Barbie’s purple dress for the blue one. By callously asking them to go wash their hands, you disrupt their rhythm, and they will never ever be happy again. How dare you?

The difficulty is that, as a parent, you never find out what kids are up to until it is too late. We recently experienced this when our four-year-old son started spreading a nasty stench that seemed to be coming from his nasal cavities. It could only be described as the smell of rotting mackerel that’s been lying in the sun for a few days. We bathed him several times, disinfected his clothes and investigated whether he had gotten into something we weren’t aware of. Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore and took him to the doctor. As it turned out, when children smell this nasty, it’s usually caused by something they stuffed up their nose. In Mendel’s case, it was a Reese’s wrapper. I didn’t know it could fit up there in the first place, but apparently, he managed just fine. (7:43:17 pm: stuff wrapper up nose).

I spoke with a friend of mine, who is a pediatrician, and found out this is not unusual at all. Children put all sorts of things up their noses, and if it doesn’t fit at first, they just push harder until they succeed. He told me about a boy who peeled off a plastic cling his mother had painstakingly put on the window while decorating for Hanukkah; the smooth plastic went in easily, but medical intervention was needed to get it out. (4:12:08 pm: do something festive with a Menorah)

Another friend talked about his nephew who had stuffed a miniature kitty up his nose, then had to follow it with a fireman to rescue the kitty. Once they were both stuck, the child saw no other solution than to put in a policeman to rescue the first two. All three had to be extracted in the emergency room. (9:06:53 pm: rack up large medical bill). Why children do these things, I don’t even want to know. I am guessing it has something to do with trying to find a purpose in life; when everybody around you is always busy, you need to come up with your own agenda. Even a four-year-old wants to feel important, and if you’re too young to have meetings and jobs and errands, you’ll just have to invent some very necessary tasks to fill your time.

I just wish they would be a little less secretive about how they plan their day; with a little prior warning about that Reese’s wrapper, I could have totally scheduled around that.