Monday, February 06, 2006

I'm just a girl who can't say no.

I had the boys yesterday.

I now understand all of those parents who allow their children to use other children's ears as footholds while climbing the fiberglass termite mound in the Family Fun! area at Woodland Park Zoo. Not that Jayden does this, God, of course not and how dare you suggest such a thing, but when he wants to climb something, I want him to be able to climb it, if only to see that ecstatic look on his face and hear him shout my name when he manages to surmount whatever previously unsurmountable object the bigger kids have surmounted before him. I have to say, though, he is pretty adept at sharing his conquests, even to the point where he gets pushed off the bronze orangutans by a horde of ravening girls and their hippie mom who didn't tell her pink-clad brats to let Jayden climb the lower rope as he's too little to reach the higher ones. Why are we the only polite ones? Stupid hippies and their Random Acts.

I would be a terrible and unfit parent. As I was handing Jayden his rain jacket and hat to get him ready to go to the zoo, I pressed my knees against the mattress to keep Kyan on the bed where I had set him. He seemed pleasantly gurgly and content. I still don't know how it happened as he's not terribly mobile yet, but he rolled down the bed to the foot, got wedged between my legs and the mattress and bonked his head on the hard floor, giving him a painful goose egg, the badge of my inability to care for two children simultaneously. He cried for all of twelve seconds and then was fine (little trooper), but everyone at the zoo looked at me like I had beaten him with chains and then locked him in the closet to cast out his demons. Evil, evil child, he must have deserved it. That was a joke. Really, it was! I love him more than life itself!! Oh, just nevermind.

I find it so difficult to say no to Jayden. He has that round, angelic face and dimples (Dimples! God, what is nature trying to do to me?) and when he lowers his chin and asks me a question in his barely audible little-boy voice, I feel like I'll scar him forever by telling him that no, he can't have a popsicle when he hasn't eaten lunch and it's 40 degrees out.

And I don't know if it's because Tina and I look something alike, and when you're eight months old your eyesight isn't very good and he thought that I was the person who took him to the aquarium, Pike Place Market AND the Pacific Science Center ALL IN ONE DAY, but when we stopped at the zoo to let Jayden climb the giant rope spiderweb and I turned Kyan to face me, he gave me a look of pure adoration, absolute love and worship and everything I totally don't deserve as I covered his hands with the little pockets on the end of his fleecy suity-thingy and he couldn't reach his cereal bits and I had to feed them to him. He must have stared at me for a whole minute, smiling and chattering. It was probably a concussion.

No comments: