As my little toddler girl Cordelia has grown older, I have charted her progress by determining the animal she was most similar to. First, it was limpet. Then turtle. Then puppy. Now that she is 18 months old, she has entered a new phase: Roman Emperor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
She now has three ways of interacting with us. First, she approaches and tugs on our clothes. This is a command to be picked up. It is ignored at your peril.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Second, once picked up, she points at things. This is a request to be brought within arm\u2019s reach of the piece of chocolate\/crayons\/dividing line of the road, accompanied by an \u201cUnnnhhhhaaarrrrr\u201d sound.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Third, when her crazy request is denied, she is filled with rage. She looks around the room, selects an object, walks over to it, carefully picks it up, and furiously flings it away.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This angry display would, if carried out by a larger person, be calculated and terrifying. However, because Cordelia is only two feet tall, it is ADORABLE.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Because of the cuteness of little children, it is easy to forget their mercurial moods and capability for launching into fits of violence with all the energy their tiny frames can muster. I\u2019m not saying Cordelia isn\u2019t adorable. But, at the same time, I know that, if she was a bit bigger and I was a bit smaller, she would gladly pick me up and shake me and shake me just to hear the funny snap snap noises.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Other Animals She Is Similar To<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Her nightmarish dining habits, language of grunts and squeals, and total lack of moral sense make her essentially indistinguishable from a goblin. When parents refer to their children as \u201clittle monsters\u201d, they are only being scrupulously honest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Throw the Kids In the Firing Line and See What Happens<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n This section is not about Cordelia. This is about the environment into which she was born. Nature provides children with adversity, so that they can grow up strong and broken. Every child should have trials in their youth, to be faced and overcome, so that they can grow up to be the best, bravest, middle managers they can be.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For Cordelia, the trial she will face, the fire that will forge her into unbreakable steel, is the Fourth of July with my family.<\/p>\n\n\n\n On the Fourth, the whole family gets together at grandma and grandpa\u2019s house on the beach. We eye each others\u2019 fresh offspring with practiced eyes and eat ribs which have been cooked in some manner. And then, while the grownups relax in the house, all of the children run down to the beach with armloads of fireworks bought at the Indian reservation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In my family, life proceeds as followed. You are born. You get fed a lot of fluids. You are annually thrown onto a beach with a dozen hyperactive prepubescents, minimal supervision, and an essentially limitless supply of bottle rockets. If you get through your childhood with both eyes intact, you are a member of the family.<\/p>\n\n\n\n (A bottle rocket, by the way, is a self-propelled firecracker. You light it, it flies about fifty feet, and goes bang. They are actually incredibly boring. But children are very innovative when it comes to ways to make them interesting. Horrible ways.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n I watched the festivities for as long as I could stand them, wincing at every near miss, experiment gone awry, and innocent crab who suddenly found itself launched high into the air and exploding. I only saw one small boy almost get hit by stray ordinance That bottle rocket was launched by my wife. She had been deprived of fireworks as a child, and thus was not as experienced with them as the average local seven-year-old. That was the point where I went and hid. She can deal with her conscience in her own time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In my family\u2019s defense, decades of this practice have not resulted in any injuries of note. Apart from minor sparkler burns and unimportant scorching, the ordeal left our young with nothing but happy memories and respect for things that explode. Oh, and a huge lack of respect for Chinese craftsmanship.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The true peak of our traditional family festivities happens after dark. That is when the piddly little crackers and smoke bombs are put away, the adults pull out their lighters, and the big guns come out. One or two of the men (and a selected handful of lucky children) take the big rockets and spark-flingers down to the beach and set them off, one by one, as everyone else sits back, drinks, and makes ironic \u201cOooh. Aaah.\u201d noises.<\/p>\n\n\n\n My family has sort of a Puritan, frugal, \u201cWhen I was a child, we ate straw and loved it, why can\u2019t today\u2019s children eat straw?\u201d sort of background. Thus, listening to them mutter during the show, as they watch the fireworks bought on the Indian Reservation at the last minute in spasms of furious bargaining, is always more entertaining than the actual show:<\/p>\n\n\n\n (Sssss … Whoosh! Pop!) The best part is always the duds. Every time the fuse is lit and nothing happens, someone says the price of the failed firework in an offended, hurt voice, as if to say \u201cBut … but … but the one-eyed Indian in the wooden shack by the Cash \u2019n\u2019 Carry gave me his sacred word of honor that this one would be really neat!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n But all this is only to describe the world Cordelia has been born into. She didn\u2019t take part. Her specific Fourth of July experience was screaming a lot.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You don\u2019t give fireworks to a one-year-old. That\u2019s what two-year-olds are for.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What a Smartass<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n I am a smartass. I do not, for a second, pretend that it is an attractive quality. That is why I present these repellent exchanges only in the name of documentation and full disclosure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I.<\/strong> II.<\/strong> Efficient Parenting Tips For the Ambivalent Parent<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Everyone knows that the parenting game is about one thing: dumping as much child-care time on your spouse as possible. There will be a time when you will enjoy playing with and taking care of an infant. That is when you are a \u201cgrandparent\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That is why, in the sake of efficiency, I advocate changing the child\u2019s diaper as much as possible, especially if it\u2019s really shitty and noxious. This enables you to get the most child-care credit with a minimal time investment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One minute of chasing fecal particles with a moist towelette counts as much as fifteen minutes playing with the child and reading it books. Fifteen minutes that you could be spending on the Playstation. So, if you\u2019re trying to pull some me-time back out of the temporal black hole your existence has become, you could do worse than to pinch your nose, dive in there, and start wiping.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Art of Deflecting the Blame<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Toddlers injure themselves almost constantly. It is how they teach themselves not to throw themselves head-first into wooden furniture. I\u2019m not sure how animals, with their inferior brains, learn not to do this. I think that this is why they don\u2019t build furniture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Since the bumps and bruises are inevitable, I have turned my mental focus to a more important issue: making sure the injuries aren\u2019t my fault. If Cordelia bonks her head and cries, well, I guess that\u2019s sad. But if it\u2019s my fault too, then I\u2019m also an asshole. I don\u2019t want that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Fortunately, my wife and I know how to determine whose fault any accident is. Blame goes to the parent that was closest to the baby when the incident occurs. However, when the baby trips, this has the unfortunate side effect of making us jump away, both trying to be farther away at the moment of impact.<\/p>\n\n\n\n By the way, in case you were wondering, there is a reason why you should never leave the baby alone in the house. Not being able to see the child makes it impossible to assign blame for anything that happens.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Basic Unit For Measurement of Parenting<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n The unit for measuring parenting is the \u201cWalk.\u201d The main change parenthood brings into your life is that you take walks. Constantly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The reason for this is simple. Every parent of a toddler, despite any claims to the contrary wants nothing more than to strap their child down for a while. And, sadly, the only way the child will tolerate this is in the \u201cwalk\u201d context.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Fortunately, walks also count as exercise. And, as any doctor will tell you, there is one good reason to exercise: so your partner will continue to want to fuck you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Words She Knows<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Cordelia is learning words. Here is what we have determined she knows, based on repeated use in similar circumstances, and how she pronounces them:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Cordelia speaks a language only her parents understand. Before, I could never see how it was possible for a child to go \u201cGa nah babababa rrrrr fwah! Vava aaaaa.\u201d and the parent says \u201cOh, that means she wants juice. And she thinks your need to be the center of attention betrays profound self-esteem issues.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Once, I thought that these parents were deluded. Now I know that they just had lots of practice deciphering their child\u2019s ramblings. Lord knows, no other mental stimulation was available.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Now, translating for Cordelia, it is my childfree friends who think I am deluded. Unfortunate. Given the choice between thinking others are idiots and being thought an idiot myself, I prefer the first one.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" As my little toddler girl Cordelia has grown older, I have charted her progress by determining the animal she was most similar to. First, it was limpet. Then turtle. Then…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[15],"class_list":["post-592","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-storyaboutthetoddler","tag-toddler","wpcat-4-id"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/ironycentral.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/592","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/ironycentral.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/ironycentral.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ironycentral.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ironycentral.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=592"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/ironycentral.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/592\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":593,"href":"http:\/\/ironycentral.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/592\/revisions\/593"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/ironycentral.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=592"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ironycentral.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=592"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ironycentral.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=592"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\u201cOooh.\u201d
(Sssss … Whiz! Whiz! Whiz! Bang.)
\u201cThat was four dollars.\u201d
(Sssss … Zip! Pow!)
\u201cAhhhh.\u201d (Sip. Sip. Sip.)
(Sssss … Fizzle.)
\u201cThat was three dollars.\u201d
(Pause.)
\u201cHey! It\u2019s the grand finale!\u201d
(Ssss … Whoosh! Bang! Whoosh! Bang! Whoosh! Bang!)
\u201cThat was ten dollars.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Little Girl\u2019s Mother: Now don\u2019t take that teddy bear. The baby is playing with it.
Little Girl: But she is drooling on it!
Me: That\u2019s OK. Teddy bears are made soft so they can absorb the drool. If they weren\u2019t meant to be drooled on, they would be made out of brick.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Well-meaning Aunt: Cordelia is so big! They grow up so fast.
Me: When they\u2019re someone else\u2019s, they grow up fast. When they\u2019re yours, they grow up slooooooooow.<\/p>\n\n\n\nWord<\/td> Pronounced<\/td><\/tr> \u201cMommy\u201d<\/td> \u201cMamamamamamamamama\u201d<\/td><\/tr> \u201cDaddy\u201d<\/td> \u201cDada\u201d<\/td><\/tr> \u201cOut\u201d<\/td> \u201cOwwwwwww\u201d<\/td><\/tr> \u201cIn\u201d<\/td> \u201cIh\u201d<\/td><\/tr> \u201cNo\u201d<\/td> \u201cNah\u201d<\/td><\/tr> \u201cYes\u201d<\/td> \u201cYahhhh\u201d<\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n