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As every parent knows, that’s actually a trick question because when it comes to being peed on, pooped on or puked on, you don’t have a choice: it’s not a question of if it will happen or even when it will happen – though probably in the middle of the night, right after you’ve put on your last clean shirt, or just as you’re rushing off to an important meeting that you’re already 20 minutes late for, etc. – but how often it will happen.
(Not to mention whether or not all three will happen at the same time, which is the parenting equivalent of hitting the “Trifecta,” even though – sadly – it isn’t nearly as rare.)
While the idea of being splattered in your own child’s pee, poop or puke makes non-parents squirm (and probably resolve to remain non-parents), most of us eventually come to accept it – even welcome it – because no matter how disgusting that is, it’s not nearly as gross as being splattered with some other kid’s pee, poop or puke – something that’s also not a question of if, or when, but how often.
From “Why Chicken Nuggets Are Better Than Prozac,” page. 83
On most days, even when I get up too early, I’m already running late. So that by the time I get showered, get dressed, get the kids ready, get in the car, get the kids to school and get to Starbucks, I have used up what little energy I began the day with and what I really want is my venti extra-shot Americano.
Now.
IIn the old days, this was easy because vain, arrogant, intimidating baristas would glare so angrily at anyone who ordered wrong – a “vanilla sugar-free grande triple latte” instead of a “triple grande sugar-free vanilla latte,” for example – the poor soul would have no choice but to take his or her drink and slink away in shame, silently vowing to avoid such humiliation tomorrow by going somewhere else and leaving Starbucks to the caffeine addicts.
Baristaphobia = shorter lines.
But now that McDonald’s has McLattes, Dunkin’ Donuts touts the dunkin’ as much as the donuts, and break rooms everywhere include at least one vending machine that can automatically make any one of a dozen coffee-drinks, Starbucks seems to have realized they have to do more than just serve coffee if they want to make money, they have to serve customers.
Who can blame them? It worked for Burger King back in the ‘70s, so why not?
(Except instead of “Hold the pickle, hold the lettuce, special orders don’t upset us,” it might be:
“Make it no foam
or sugar free
whatever you want
we’ll serve with glee
our growth has slowed
so we can’t be
snobs anymore.”)
Obviously, there’s nothing inherently wrong with being nice, but the result of this customer-friendly attitude is that all the people who used to stay away from Starbucks because they were afraid of being yelled at are now standing in line right in front of me, asking what the difference between a “misto” and a “macchiato” is or trying to decide if they’d like to try a breakfast sandwich.
Worse, the baristas are not just being polite to them, they’re being chatty, too. Which means that in addition to wanting to know exactly how they can make the customer’s drink exactly the way they’d like it made, they want to know how their day is, what kind of plans they have, how their family is, etc.
And when I finally get to the front of the line, they want to know that about me, too.
Except at 7:43 in the morning, after having been up all night with a vomiting toddler and a dog who wants me to get up every couple of hours and go to the window to look at the neighbor’s cat, I don’t want to be friendly to anyone – not my kids, not my spouse, not my neighbors and certainly not my barista.
Unfortunately, as much as I want to respond to the question “How’s your day going so far?” by saying “It would be a lot better if I didn’t have to wait in line for 25 minutes to get a cup of coffee,” I don’t.
Because whether it’s crack cocaine or caffeine, addicts like me will do anything to get their fix – even smile and pretend to be friendly.
(And while there are still any number of alternatives to Starbucks, places where the lines are short and somber, and the baristas still act like divas, they’re a few blocks out of the way, and the only thing worse than waiting a few extra minutes in line is waiting a few extra minutes in traffic.)
WIFE: Where you going?
HUSBAND: I thought I’d run out and get some Ben & Jerry’s Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough.
WIFE: What about our post-holiday diet?
HUSBAND: We finished it.
WIFE: Yeah — yesterday.
HUSBAND: Which means today I can finally eat what I want to.
Should genetic engineering and/or technology ever progress to the point where pretty much anything is possible, the following would be useful augmentations to the standard parent:
- Extra arms
- Some kind of emotional fuse that would blow before we did
- Two mouths – not to clear up the problem of talking out of both sides of the one we have, but so we could have an adult conversation with our spouse while simultaneously telling our kids why it’s a bad idea to see how many pieces of furniture they can stack on the dog
- A personal thermostat so we could lower our core temperature whenever an infant or exhausted toddler falls asleep on our chest, enabling us to not have to choose between heat-stroke and moving a sleeping child
- 5-gallon bladder (for same reason as above)
- No need for sleep
- Implantable encyclopedia, because who can remember “Why is the sky blue?“
- A safe, legal, side-effect free substance that gives us the energy of a three-year-old – not to keep up with a three-year-old, of course, but so we’d have the energy to get things down when our three-year-old finally goes to sleep
- A filter that enables us to watch the same animated TV show over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over without getting bored
- A neuro-plug-in that allows us to enter a zen-like state whenever we have to listen to the kind of long, boring, ultimately pointless stories kids under 10 tend to tell, but that still enables us to back-channel so they can’t tell we’re not really listening
- A neuro-plug-in that allows the neuro-plug-in listed above to work on spouses, too
- Memory implants to help us remember the names and attributes of all Transformer, Pokemon, Bella Sara etc. characters
- A dial that allows us to manipulate our taste buds so that all the awful-tasting foods we make our kids eat (but then have to choke down ourself so we can set a good example) taste like chocolate to us
- Portable, detachable eyeballs that we can hide on the shelf in our kid’s room so that when that eerie silence falls over the house we can see exactly what trouble they’re causing
- A tracking device that helps us locate all the jackets, pants, shoes, socks etc. our kid “forgot” to hang up and now can’t find
- A remote-control bladder override button so that when we’re leaving for a long car trip and our kids swear they don’t have to go pee we can drain their 98% full bladder anyway
- Anti-bacterial skin so we don’t catch every single cold our kids bring home from daycare
- The same kind of sonar that bats have, only this would let us know when balls, pillows, toy trucks and other objects are accidentally – and inexplicably – launched at our heads
- Selective hearing – somewhat like what we have now, only with a much, much greater degree of control, so that instead of figuratively “tuning out” our kids when they whine and cry because we won’t give them another cookie, we would actually be able to shut off whatever part of the audio spectrum they use so we actually wouldn’t hear them
- The ability to “aim” our voice so only the kid we’re actively yelling at can hear us, enabling us to make threats during church, while standing in the supermarket check-out line, at the movie theater — anywhere decorum prohibits loud, angry outbursts
- Bite-proof skin
- Implantable BS detector
- Spare limbs to replace those inadvertently damaged by jumping toddlers, grade schoolers who underestimate their own strength and teenagers who encourage us to follow them down the hill on a snowboard without realizing we’re not nearly as resilient as they are.
According to language experts, English includes approximately 250,000 words, which means that if a person were to answer any given question using only three of them, there would be 15,624,812,500,500,000 possibilities.
So why is it kids always seem to ignore the other 15,624,812,500,499,999 and just say “I don’t know?”
PARENT: What are you doing?
KID: I don’t know.
PARENT: Have you seen your brother?
KID: I don’t know.
PARENT: Why is your lip bleeding?
KID: I don’t know.
PARENT: Did he hit you?
KID: I don’t know.
PARENT: Are you even listening to me?
KID: I don’t know.
True, there are occasions when they really, truly don’t know, but these are rare. Which means as parents, we usually have to spend anywhere from five minutes to five hours prodding and probing them for an actual answer – a course of action that results in them being ticked at us for interrogating them like a Guantanamo Bay-detainee, and us being ticked at them for making us interrogate them like some Guantanamo Bay-detainee when they could just as easily have told us what we needed to know in the first place.
But before we attribute “I don’t know” to their being lazy, lethargic, unfocused, inattentive, flip, passive-aggressive, malnourished, narcissistic, ego-centric, spoiled or brain-damaged from spending too much time playing video games and watching TV, keep in mind that developmental psychologists say the adolescent mind is far from fully developed.
So when kids say “I don’t know,” in practical terms, they don’t — because the part of their brain that’s trying to answer our question (a part that’s got to be tucked away somewhere in some insignificant corner of some underused lobe) isn’t communicating with the part of their brain that knows what the answer is, and probably won’t be able to with any kind of speed or reliability until they’re in their 20s.
Which means that just about the time they stop answering every question with “I don’t know,” we’ll be starting to thanks to the debilitating effects of aging and all that extra wear and tear our brains have been subjected to over the years thanks to our kids.
Check out “The Gigglesnort Test” at undercaffeinated mom for a fun approach to dealing with this problem.
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