By way of introduction…


Having a big family is like cooking a frog. If you put a frog in boiling water, he’ll jump out to save his life. But, if you put him in a pot with room temperature water and slowly bring it to a boil, he has no idea what’s coming until it’s too late. That’s sort of what happened to me. I had one baby and he was cute, so I had another and she was cute and so it goes….and now it’s today, and I have five kids ranging in age from 4 up to 19 and they aren’t so cute anymore.

Yeah, go ahead and read that again….5 children and they’re driving me nuts

They are either pitching fits because they can’t go where they want to go when they want to go or they have found a new lifestyle that I am supposed to embrace and love and support, no matter how cockamamie it sounds to me.

So, I decided to go see the doctor to see what kind of medicinal therapy I can get to help me deal with these ankle biters.

So, while I am waiting in the waiting room, I spot an adorable, clean baby smiling up to its perfectly helpful non-rival of a three year old older sibling on a magazine cover. Parenting magazines lure me in with titles like, Tips for School Age Kids. Well, this was looking like a good day for research and development in the Wood/Keith Family lab.

When reading any book or article, I start by reading about the author. I like to know who I am getting advice from, unless I am in the produce department at the grocery store and I can’t tell which melon is ripe and which one needs a few more days, then I’ll take advice from anyone. Anyway, I look at the pictures of the article authors and all of them have perfect hair, smudgeless make-up and ironed shirts without spit-up, snot or spaghetti sauce stains on them. This immediately puts me on edge. I haven’t had perfect hair since I did it all up nice before I went to the hospital to have my first child. I wanted to be sure that I looked all put together for the pictures we would take before, during and after the miracle of birth. But after the pitocin started flowing and the contractions started coming…I didn’t give a damn about my hair. In fact, all I wanted to do was to waddle out to the dumpster so I could get rid of Satan’s Spawn and start over again with the beautiful experience I had been promised.

Needless to say, these women didn’t even look like they had even showed up for the job of labor, delivery and continued devotion to irrational children.

But, I am willing to give anyone the benefit of the doubt. You can’t judge a book by its cover (even though I do it all the time), so you cannot judge an author by their picture. I then go on to read the bios. All of them have PhDs from high profile schools. How do you learn about raising children by reading a book and listening to a lecture. But again, who am I to judge? I mean, I was trying to learn by reading a free magazine. I wasn’t even willing to invest in the experience by buying the rag.

I continue reading. One of the Princesses of Pristine has only ONE child who is six months old, while another is blessed with 5 year old twins…only TWO of God’s Sweet Spirits. What kind of experience is that? I was looking for a wrinkled old sage who had never lost a child in the Wal-Mart. I suspect these Wonder Women have nannies. I doubt any of these women had ever even gotten one spec of poop under their perfectly manicured fingernails.

I thought things couldn’t get any more desperate but they did. All of the articles were geared towards the wrong age groups. They covered infants and toddlers. Mine are all out of that stage. Which brings me to another point…since when is a 2 yr old considered a “school-age child?” Two year olds don’t go to school. They go to day care to play, have snack and take a nap on a mat. If that was school, I’d still be there today.

Then they move onto Pre-School age kids, of which, I have two. But my two are not twins and they are not separates. They are more like a sweater set. Not good on their own, and really hot when put together. The articles solutions for bad behavior were things like time-out. Time out doesn’t work at my house because while I am putting one in time-out, the other one is half-way down the street without her panties on! When I run out to get that one, the other one is trying to make popcorn by putting the popcorn in the microwave without taking the plastic wrapping off. So, I skipped those articles.

On to the Tween. One of my sons is 13. I don’t know if that makes him a teen or a tween. I don’t even know what a tween is. He is adorable and sweet and wants to be just like his older brother and sister. Obviously, if I can get those two straightened out, the 13 year old is covered. So I skip that article.

There were no other articles. According to Parenting Gurus, kids are perfect by they time they hit 15. There’s no more need to raise them. I couldn’t find one article that told me how to handle a love-sick, hormonal irrational 17 year old girl or a 19 year old boy who isn’t ready to move away from home, but is ready to be free of familial responsibilities..

The nurse calls my name. I follow her to the backroom where she asks me to step on the scale…oh forget it. I turn around to leave realizing all I need is a vacation that includes an all you can sleep buffet. But since I am the butcher, baker and candlestick maker in my home, I will just settle for some Ben & Jerry’s.