Just Say "Yes"

As the mother of two children under the age of five, there are a lot of times that I find myself saying, “No.” “No, you may not have ice cream for breakfast.” “No, you may not lick the dishwasher.” “No, you may not bring that earthworm/dead mouse/giant tree branch into the house.” “No, you may not run around the neighborhood naked.” “No, you may not have a third popsicle.” “No, you may not go to the grocery store wearing only Perry the Platypus underpants and a plastic crown.” And despite the fact that I know I am saying “no” for their own good, sometimes I feel like I’m always the bad guy, always putting the kibosh on my kids’ fun.

So I decided that every time I start to say “no,” I’m going to stop and think about whether I really, truly need to say it. When the question is, “Can I stick a fork into this electrical outlet?”, the answer obviously needs to be “no.” But when the question is, “Can I have a popsicle for supper?”, or “Can I wear my tutu to church?”, or “Can we go outside and stomp in the puddles while it’s raining?”, sometimes the answer can be “YES!” When the issue is not danger, but rather my own convenience or my own comfort, sometimes the answer needs to be “Yes.”

Last week, my daughter wanted to paint in the kitchen. Being 2-1/2, her painting tends to cover not only the paper, but also the easel, the floor, the sink, her clothes, herself, and me. I knew we needed to go pick up her brother from preschool in an hour, so I initially said, “No.” But then I thought about it, and realized that no-one would care if I brought her to school with paint streaks covering her arms and her face. No-one would care (or even know) if I left the kitchen floor covered in dried paint until I got a chance to scrub it off later in the day. So I took a deep breath and said, “Yes.” I stripped off all her clothes except her diaper, gave her a handful of paint brushes and an entire jar of purple paint, and let her loose. She started off with a few tentative brushstrokes on the paper, but was soon slathering her palms with globs of paint and announcing, “Pawprint!” while slapping her hand onto the paper, flinging bits of paint across the room and all over her face and mine. She dunked her hand into the cup of water, happily watching it slosh over. She noticed the drips of paint on the floor and touched them with her toes, at first tentatively, and then sliding them into long colored streaks with great glee.

It looked something like this:

Actually, this was only the midpoint. But the time she was done, her face was covered in purple war paint, there were purple streaks in her hair, her legs were coated from thighs to toes, the cup of water had been knocked to the floor, and we’d even added a bit of pink and yellow paint for contrast. The kitchen floor looked like a demented rainbow.

And we were both grinning and laughing.

She announced she was done 15 minutes before we had to leave, so I tossed her in the bathtub, sprayed her off with the showerhead (which made us both grin and giggle even more), and got rid of most of the paint. I put her in fresh clothes and we hopped in the car, happier and more relaxed than either of us had been in a long time.

It’s not always easy, you’re often tempted not to do it, but sometimes, the best thing to do is to just say, “YES!” Because although “yes” rhymes with “mess,” it also rhymes with “de-stress” and “success”!

My Kids Make Me a Better Housekeeper

Confession time: I am a slob. An unrepentant (mostly), inveterate, habitual slob. I'm not dirty, but I am messy. I like having my clothes in piles instead of in drawers or on hangers. I need my shoes out where I can see them, not tucked into cubbies or dangling from a shoe tree. I see no reason to keep my toothbrush anywhere other than right on the sink where I can grab it with soap in my eyes and my glasses off. And towels dry just as quickly when thrown haphazardly over the curtain rod as they do when folded neatly on a towel rack. I'm a slob, and I don't care who knows it.

When I got married to a neat and tidy husband, I learned to curb my messy tendencies. Somewhat. OK, a little bit. Okay, okay, a TEEENY TINY bit. I have a shoe tree that most of my shoes are on. Some of my clothes land in the closet even though others still live on the couch. I hang the towels neatly on the towel rod in my husband's bathroom all the time and even in my own bathroom when we have company.

But what really made me rein in my inner slob was having kids. Most parents get a little germaphobic when their first child is born, but I'm not talking cleanliness, just messiness. When you have a baby, the amount of stuff in your house expands exponentially. The crib, the car seats, the swing, the diaper pail, the high chair, the piles of diapers and wipes and medicines, the socks and the onesies and the cute little hats, the blankets and the stuffed animals and the rattles and the light-up toys, the binkies and the bottles...it just never ends. You learn to be neat so your house doesn't implode from its own weight. But let's be honest: you also learn to be neat so you're never hunting for a binkie at 3am with an infant screeching in your ear. You learn to be neat so you know if you're about to dirty the last clean bottle and you need to run the dishwasher NOW before you're faced with a hungry child and a stack of unwashed bottles. You learn to be neat so an unexpected poopsplosion doesn't suddenly reveal that you're out of diapers/baby wipes/onesies.

And once your children become mobile, the need for neatness is even greater. Any item left on the floor will promptly be popped into a curious mouth, whether it be a stale Cheerio, a petrified raisin, a dead bug, a penny, or a small Lego piece. And speaking of small Lego pieces, the mobile child is not the only one whose tender toes are in imminent danger of being impaled by small toys left on the floor. What parent among us has not endured the agony of stepping on a Lego or a Barbie shoe or an abandoned Monopoly figurine with a bare foot in the middle of the night?

Being neat is a survival tactic.

Yes, motherhood has curbed some of my worst messy tendencies. But it more than makes up for it by allowing me to enjoy other types of messy fun: hands covered in sidewalk chalk dust, gluey pieces of macaroni sliding slimily across a piece of construction paper, licking the frosting off a chocolate cupcake, fingers squelching though mud in search of earthworms, cutting tissue paper into confetti, jumping in puddles. Motherhood is a wonderful balance between neat and messy!