Meditations on Mini-Humans

I've mentioned before that I come from a gigantically large family.  My dad has six brothers and sisters and my mom has eight.  I have spent my whole life meeting a new baby cousin, or two or three new baby cousins, every year.  Because of this, I was always a popular babysitter in my old neighborhood.  I'd like to say it was because of my skill relating to young children, but in reality I know the secret to my success was that I never told the parents when the kids acted like little demons.  I also enjoyed cleaning and organizing toy rooms after the kids went to bed at night.  Babysitting entrepreneurs, feel free to borrow my patented system for guaranteed success.  You're welcome.

To top it off, I also used to teach preschool.  It was the hardest and least-paying job I have ever had, but I laughed out loud every day and that counted for a lot in my book.  Most of the kids had parents who spoke English as a second language and that made the job difficult.  I can speak a little Spanish and a little Polish, all taught to me by three and four year olds.  I had one little guy who spoke not a word of English at the beginning of the year.  It was amazing to see how quickly he picked it up.  He came back from Christmas break with a big ole unicorn horn bump in the middle of his forehead.  When I asked him what happened, he stuttered for a few seconds and then said, "Uhhh, running... running... running... wall."  That summed it up nicely.

Anyway, the last few years of my life have been very lacking in kids.  I have a couple of nephews and my friend who grew up in Connecticut has a baby who calls me "Awwnt Taryn," which sounds so snooty to my down-to-earth perfect Chicago ears.  We say "Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhnt" in these parts.  Some of my friends have kids and they're all adorable and I love looking at their pictures on Facebook, but all in all kids are pretty rare in my sheltered existence.  I sometimes go weeks without talking to anyone under the age of five, something that was unheard of for me in the past.

As a result, I am really out of practice in dealing with them.  I spent the last two days playing with young toddlers and I felt like one of the stereotypical yuppies from the movies, watching open-mouthed with shock as the strange foreign species of tiny human drooled all over my shoes.  I observed my friend's one-year-old, Taylor, for two hours and he fell roughly thirty times.  How does anyone survive being a toddler?  This kid was hell bent on committing suicide.  He was bound and determined to shove something in an electrical outlet and when that was blocked, he tried to throw himself off a table onto a marble floor.  He pointed at everything in the room and called it a duck.  I asked his parents if maybe they considered taking him to a doctor about his problem with seeing birds everywhere, but they seemed unconcerned.  I left that evening absolutely exhausted;  I have no idea how parents do this every single day. 

I also happened to catch the horror movie known as "Twenty-Four Hours with Octomom" on Oprah the other night.  I doubt I will ever recover from that.  Children crept and crawled on every surface, scuttling out of the woodwork like cockroaches.  I really do love babies, and her kids are kind of shockingly cute, but holy crap did it make my skin crawl.  I considered googling at-home tubal ligation tips before the episode was over.  I want to say it right here, on the record, that if I ever have octuplets at any point in the future, I give you all permission to punch me in the face as hard as you can and auction off the children, one by one, to the highest bidder.  There is something really disturbing about a roving pack of infants.  I can't play a part in unleashing another litter of that kind of terror onto the world.

So, yeah, I am torn on the whole kid thing.  I get along with them really well, probably because my sense of humor is right about at the same level as a preschooler's, but I don't know if I am selfless enough to be that devoted to another person.  It's really nice now to get my little cousin Maddie all riled up and then send her home.  I have to say my quiet condo and my mentally unstable dog looked pretty good after watching little Taylor bounce off the walls the other night.  On the other hand, it's pretty great watching a creature experience life for the first time.  There's something magical when a little kid genuinely loves you, and I think life would be pretty empty without that.

So I guess time will tell whether they'll be a little Taryn running around terrorizing the world.  Until then, poor Cooper has to endure the brunt of any ticking from my biological clock.  It's okay, though, as he looks really great in baby clothes.