Christmas in Idaho (Survivor: Boise Edition)

After about 10 days in San Francisco, I came home and turned around and took my family to Boise, Idaho for Christmas. It may be interesting to note that we were spending time with a total of nine family members in my grandparents home, and that, through events that would ruin the story here, some of the family had never met each other before, and five of the members have not been around kids in any way for the past 20 years for over about an hour. Before we brought our kids to their house for 10 days, I called each party individually and warned them that even the best-behaved kids have their "moments", an asked for patience.

My six-year-old boy, Ryan, is one of the most well-behaved children I've ever seen, and he didn't disappoint me on the trip. My little girl, Kaitlyn, turns two this month (January), and she hit the "terrible twos" in full stride as soon as we set foot in Idaho. Well, maybe it hit two days before we left when she knocked over our Christmas tree while trying to wedge herself between it and the window, but why quibble over technicalities?

For those of you who don't know, the Terrible Twos are a time of exponential mental growth in children. They continually test boundaries of time, space, and people. They start to talk with full ideas ("No! No eat that-that yucky!"), exert independence, and, in general, require full attention during all waking moments. It's a very confusing time for the child, and a lot of time they misinterpret their own emotions--they know they are feeling something strongly--it may go from delight to a crying fit in just a few seconds.

The fun thing about the terrible twos is that you can really start to see the mental processes that the child is going through while working out ideas. Our Kaitlyn is very sweet and snuggly, so it was cute for her to run around saying "Merr-ree Kissmus!" and giving us big hugs. That is, it was cute to us...

My grandparents home is made of metal and glass, with sharp-pointed corners and jagged rocks interspersed throughout the house. My Grandmother collects china, figurines, hand-painted stuff, and other shrapnel-like items. They did take a lot of time to childproof the house before we got there--that is, they took steps to prevent the house from being destroyed by our child. Childproofing is actually designing the house to be safe for the child to walk around in, not "whew, now they won't break our stuff..."

But, thankfully, we did have a cure, which we discovered a couple of days before we left--Kaitlyn has been entranced by the movie "The Sound of Music", which we got on DVD. The DVD even allows us to play all the songs and skip the dialog, which worked out great--as soon as we popped it in, we have about 20 minutes to get something done with less than full supervision. Somewhere between the scene with the puppet show and Mother Superior singing "Climb Every Mountain", she loses focus on the movie and takes a break to wander around and test the tensile strength of random objects.

So we whipped everyone's ass with "The Sound of Music", which we played about 40 times while we were there and soon became a soundtrack inside my brain. And I, subconsciously, sank into a paranoid delusion that we were ruining everyone's time with our high-maintenance lifestyle. We also all lived in the same room for 10 days, which reminded me of a cross between "Angela's Ashes" and an episode of "The Twilight Zone".

In our house, there are a couple of "Safe Zones" where we can situate poor Kaitlyn, knowing she won't plug a fork into the wall socket or stuff M&M's into the VCR. We can leave her toys out to come and go and play with as she likes without having to disinfect the place after each play session. No such luck at the Grandparents' place.

An additional humorous contrast is that my grandfather was an airline pilot, and operates his life on quite a systematic schedule. Additionally, he hates to waste time waiting for things, and pretty much refuses to wait in most cases. Contrast this with the twenty minutes it takes to put a two-year-old's socks, shoes, and coat on. Quite funny (to us).

So, after a couple of days of standing vigil, I developed that self-conscious paranoia like the sailors on the submarine that start cutting themselves across the arm and imaging that the walls are closing in. my eyes started to dart back and forth, I heard voices saying "You suck!" and "Thanks for ruining Christmas, jerk!", and the corners of my mouth started twitching involuntarily.

There were also dogs. In an interesting ironic-karma thing, I have a somewhat irrational distrust of dogs that, despite my continuing efforts to rationalize and overcome, persists. Here is a picture of the aftermath from my formative-years experience with a German shepherd. Subsequently, I had to have rabies shots, have to shave twice a day, and disappear for hours whenever there's a full moon out (just keep to the road and stay off the moors)....

Try not to be jealous of my sweet threads.

At some point, I stopped counting all the times it was said that "raising kids is just like raising dogs"...This seems quite rational to a person who has dogs and not kids, and is highly offensive to people with kids and no dogs (and fodder for humor for the former). This was okay until my grandfather decided to test the theory by stalking up behind Kaitlyn, clapping loudly right behind her head, and yelling "No!" when she touched the figurines on the table, hoping to condition her against touching them in the future (thank God it didn't work--she just turned and looked at him blankly)--I also had to draw the line at them tapping her on the nose to try to make her swallow her medicine...

So the facts are that it was a wonderful time and the whole crowd was quite patient and extremely generous, said nothing whatsoever critical, and we had a very nice time (although we were tired and ready to come home at the end). My paranoid delusions eventually ceased when the purple grasshopper told me to chill out and stop taking things so personally, and that intelligent adults who understand that they are going to spend several days with a 2-year-old probably realize that,at some point, the child is going to act like a 2-year-old and said adults probably won't hold me personally accountable for my offspring's actions.

So Long, Farewell, Auf wiedersehn, Good Bye...