Here are the best ones, IMHO. Feel free to weigh in with your favorites.
3. They conduct themselves poorly in public.
8. They have absolutely no coordination.
22. They draw on others' faces when they pass out.
25. Things go wrong around them for no apparent reason.
Number 8 and number 25 made me laugh hysterically for probably about 2 minutes straight because they reminded me of an incident that happened years ago when my kids were little. A friend of mine had twins the same age as my daughter and so they often played together. I'm sure these two little boys have since both grown up to be perfectly delightful and entirely normal young men, but at 2 they were both so clumsy and uncoordinated that they scared the living crap out of me whenever they came over.
Our home was a two-story and my daughter's room was at the top of the stairs. This meant that, no matter HOW I tried to anticipate and bring every possible toy or game downstairs for them to play with, there was always something or some reason that they felt necessitated they go up those stairs.
Which meant they had to come down the stairs.
While my daughter at two was like a little monkey and dashed around the house, racing up and down the stairs without a care, these two little Neanderthals would lug themselves up the stairs like it was Mount Everest and they were the only sherpas for an entire expedition, which -- while funny -- was not particularly dangerous. It was the descent that was horrifying. Every time.
As they seemed psychologically incapable of going anywhere without the other, they would always descend the staircase together. Within just the first few top steps, one would invariably hit the hall, bouncing off and into his brother, and the careening would begin like bumper cars in a narrow aisle. Rarely did either of them actually fall. They seemed to use each other to collide into as they rocketed down the steps, yet the possibility of tumbling was never more than one step away. Even at two, these boys were stout and built low to the ground; if I had tried to throw my body in the way to slow the avalanche, they would have just taken me out.
One evening their mom had stayed to chat and the kids had sneaked upstairs. I wasn't aware that they were upstairs until I looked from the dining room and saw Bill at the top of the stairs. Justin, the other twin, mysteriously wasn't with him. The absence of the necessary twin must have caused Bill to suffer from vertigo because he took a few steps, stopped, and began to sway as he stared down the staircase. I arose immediately and indicated to their mother that we needed to grab Bill from the stairs, but before anyone could react, he threw out his hands like a blind man looking for something solid, and then just did a full-length face plant down the stairs. He stuck so hard, he didn't even slide. He just lay there, face down, head and shoulders pointed down the stairs.
Even as the screaming started, it was perfectly obvious that he wasn't really hurt. But his mother never really accepted that as my defense for laughing so hard.
We weren't really close after that.
#14 isn't anything my children ever did, but the cats do it all the time. I really don't know the attraction to shoes which smell like dead dog poop (which is the best description I can give for what the car smells like in the summer when one of the kids takes their shoes off), but it has a very soporific effect upon felines.
ReplyDeleteFor that matter I'm still about as coordinated as the kid in #8.
My girls never drew on each other, but I do remember being woken up one morning and even without my glasses I realized something looked odd about my youngest. Putting on the glasses and I realized she had no bangs left at all. The child who wouldn't let me near her with a pair of scissors to trim a single wayward strand of hair had sat still for God knows how long while her older sister gave her a hair cut. Which involved trimming that bangs back to the hairline.
That afternoon there was a visit to the hairdressers' and the first of many pixie cuts.
HAHAHAHAHA! Love the story about your daughter.
DeleteWhen we were little, my sister and I made our brother, who was considerably younger than we were, sit still while we put makeup on him. We liked the practice and it was deliciously naughty. AND my brother was far too young to know he was being made the stooge.
Yeah, haha, except for the youngest was the stooge. I'm the youngest...
ReplyDeleteMy brother's favorite thing was at my Grandparent's house. When I, as the youngest was maybe 4-6 years old, my Grnadparents built a huge pretty house on Lake Michigan, expensive real estate. And they loved their only son so much they added a full upstairs that was made specifically for our family to visit. A room with a king size for Mom and Dad(and a mini-living room besides), a separate room with a queen size for my only sister, and a large room for the three boys, with two single beds.
It still mystifies me. Was I that hated by my oh so proper Nana? I had the best manners of the boys, why did I rate a fold out bed with a bar in the middle that could always be felt even in my lightest days? Not sure if you guessed it or not, but I got folded up in that bed so many times I started sleeping with my knees touching my nose. Har har and screw all you older siblings!
I think the "baby" of the family is never really allowed to grow up. So they never really gain access to the placement of the older kids and adults. Sucks, but there it is. Every Nana wants her tiniest angel to stay that way...so you got the little kid's fold out bed...just like at the hotel.
DeleteIf it's any consolation, I would have had to sleep in the fold out bed, because even though I was the middle kid, I weighed in at around 85 pounds in junior high (made it all the way to 98 in high school...so I was always put on the shitty mattress because "I didn't weigh anything". My brother, 3 years younger, grew bigger than me early on. So I got shoved to the back of the bus.
Yes, I am consoled, my soul is healed. My Nana was not the kindly lady that worshipped her tiniest angel and my Mother had this theory that I would be picked on harder if I was protected. That may well have been true, but all it did was make me feel isolated and loved less.
DeleteThat said, I grew a great personal sense of self reliance and I would not change a memory. Would a protected mama's boy have chased his older brother through the house with a bared machete screaming death threats and traumatizing both the brother and the older sister babysitting? I don't think so. Mama's little angel, that's me. Heh...
It's true what you say about youngest children. My mom wanted me to stay "her baby", and my three older siblings never took me seriously BECAUSE I was "the baby". The dynamic lingers a little bit to this day even though we're all in our 40s. Drives me nuts but it is what it is.
ReplyDeleteI laughed out loud at your description of the twins bouncing off each other down the stairs. Hahahahah! I can picture it. Kids are hilarious at that age.
These two were particularly uncoordinated. They always looked as if they had just learned to walk and were still busily building neural synapses to address the requirements of balance and timing. It was a hoot, except I was completely terrified that they were going to die on my watch.
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