Melt Downs Here, There and Everywhere

Life with two toddlers can be interesting. You are always walking on eggshells, wondering what might set them off on a crying jag. They get upset at the smallest of things, but that small thing could result in you bolting from a restaurant and taking refuge in a car from the stares of a thousand fellow diners who wonder why you can’t control your child.

How do they make tears appear on demand? It is an unexplained phenomenon. How do they get so fired up about the smallest thing? They cry better than the cowardly lion in the Wizard of Oz. And how can they completely go insane over something as small as a sticker not sticking to their shirt?

I have two children who are as different as night and day. Tyson is mellow, laid back and a “good listener” when it comes to obeying mom and dad. Sydney is….well, she is going to read this some day, so let’s just say she is the, er, opposite.  The battles we are going to have during her teen-age years are going to be epic. If I don’t have a heart attack before then, it will most certainly come during one of her ginormous fits over not being allowed to stay out all night with her bad-boy boyfriend.

But they are two-of-a-kind when it comes to melt downs. On any given day, we have a couple of crying fits out of both of the children. Over the damndest things.

Here are the odd things that can make either one of my kids go into a crying fit:

Sydney

The radio not playing her favorite song.

A song on the radio sung by a man instead of a woman.

Me singing a song. (This brings others to tears, too….I just beat you to the joke you were thinking. Ha Ha.)

One of the dogs touching her as it walks by.

Any clothing item she is wearing, any part of her body, or any toy she is playing with getting even a single drop of water on it.

A sticker not sticking to her clothing. (She has even awakened in the middle of the night and cried long and hard to the point where I have to go in and settle her, all because the sticker she put on her pajamas before she went to bed is not there at 3 a.m.)

Going to bed.

Waking up.

Not getting to wear her Halloween costume anytime, anywhere, any day.

Her shoes being too tight. (Not too small, mind you. The same shoes she wore the day before and will wear the next day. Just on THIS day, they are too tight.)

The sun going down.

The moon not being visible at night.

Dinner time.

Her dad calling her Sydney Grace Gregg. (It is JUST SYDNEY dad!)

Tyson 

The dogs staring him down when he has a snack in his hand. (Not actually stealing the snack, but just looking like they might steal it.)

Anything other than Team Umizoomi being on the television.

The robot in Team Umizoomi swimming in an Olympic-style race. (No idea. But he can’t seem to watch this episode without cowering and crying.)

Not being allowed to push a desk chair around the house. (It might be a good workout for him, but we don’t need any scrapes on the wooden floor.)

Not getting to go to bed. (Unlike his sister, he likes to sleep. He is ready to go down about 8 p.m. and gets cranky if you delay.)

Sitting him in his bathtub seat rather than just letting him rough it alone in the tub.

Tearing his food into bite-sized pieces rather than letting him chow down on something that would necessitate me performing the Heimlich maneuver.

Not letting him eat the top of a crayon. (I’ve caught him with blue or green tongues more than I care to admit.)

That’s just a start. If I were to track the things that upset them to the point of anger/tears for the next six months, this list would be 1) as long as Kirstie Alley’s grocery list and 2) as crazy as a lunch date with Amanda Byne and Lindsay Lohan.

Yes, Syndey’s list is much longer. That is either because she is a girl, because she is older or because she is a drama queen. You make the call.

I can laugh now. But when we are going through these little mini-fits, laughter is the furthest thing from my mind.

Destined for The Big Bang Theory or Monday Night Football?

Sydney is not quite 3. She is smart as a whip, has an incredible vocabulary for her age, is extremely klutzy and a “girly” girl to the Nth-degree.

Tyson is 15 months old. He is rambunctious, says only a few words, seems uninterested in learning and can climb a set of stairs faster than I can walk them.

Can you predict your kid’s future in the first couple years of life? Will these traits follow them into their teens? Is Sydney destined to be a bookworm and the last kid picked in gym class? Will Tyson be the star athlete who can’t score enough on his SATs to play in college?

I’m asking. Please weigh in, veteran parents.

I realized that what I have just described is stereotypical of boys and girls. But this has to be more than that, doesn't it?

  

                                                     Princess Sydney
 
Sydney can carry on a conversation like an adult. In fact, she talks TOO much. She is sometimes like Robin Williams on crack. Or Robin Williams when he wasn’t on crack.

She loves to have a book read to her. She has a great memory. She puts things together quickly. After two readings of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, she started to call her oatmeal “porridge.”

It has always been like this. She could say a couple dozen words at a year old and she knew her ABCs and how to count to 20 by 18 months.

I don’t know how she compares to most kids. I do know of the few we regularly encounter, she seems ahead of them intellectually.

She’s also a grade-A, Jerry Lewis-like klutz. She falls a lot, runs funny, can’t even position her hands right to catch a ball and will fail to find something that is six inches from her feet, despite detailed directions.

She appears to have zero athletic ability. She’d fit right in with the gang from The Big Bang Theory.

We face a big decision with her – her birthday is Aug. 30. She turns 3 this year, but in a couple more it will be 5. I have no doubt she will intellectually be ready for kindergarten. But will she be physically?

She will be the youngest and probably the smallest – she is petite – in her class. I worry not about kindergarten, but later years. Will she be the last person picked on the playground? Will she have trouble standing up to bullies? Will she be a terrible athlete who could benefit from being older than her classmates as opposed to younger?

She also is as girly-girl as you can get. She wants her toenails painted and she wants to wear princess dresses. She would definitely be Blair Warner and not Jo Polniaczek if she lived in Mrs. Garrett’s house and was learning the facts of life.

                                                      Preparing to destroy a bag of blocks

Meanwhile, Tyson is the opposite. The kid doesn’t say many words -- in fact, he prefers to communicate in grunts -- has little interest in being read to and seems to shun all intellectual endeavors.

But does he like to motor. Never wants to sit still. He’s a Tazmanian Devil.

He's the reason baby gates were invented. He wants to climb every step he sees and do it in record fashion. He literally laughs as he crawls up.

The other day, he started wrestling his older, and much bigger, sister, tackling her to the ground and climbing on top of her. The kid just learned to walk and he’s already tackling people like he is in the WWE.

He’s fearless. It is not unusual for us to find a big red knot or welt on his head or face and have no idea how it got there. I’ve even considered calling child welfare on the wife, but then we’ll see him run into a wall or chair or something and it becomes evident how they made their way to his noggin.

When I read to him, he grabs the book out of my hand and turns the pages himself, throws it on the ground or tries to tear the pages apart. He has as much interest in books as Snooki.

So, is this them? Do kids maintain the same traits they show in the first couple years throughout their lives?

More importantly: is there something I can do to head these things off?  I want both of my kids to be well-rounded. What can I do to ensure that?

Is this a nature vs. nurture debate?  I’m not sure.

Weigh in veteran parents. Tell me how your children changed or remained the same from when they were toddlers. I’m interested.

A Couple of Firsts in the Gregg Household

Hello. It has been awhile.

Things ARE happening with the kids. And yes, they ARE funny. But I have been either too busy or too lazy to post. We had a vacation. We prepared our house for sale. LeBron returned to Cleveland. There was that whole World Cup thing. (Ok, I maybe caught about five minutes total.)

We do have two freaking kids under the age of 3, for God’s sake. Give me a break. I have mastered the art of working and parenting on four hours of sleep a night for weeks at a time, but there is not a lot of energy left for writing.

What has happened during the past two months? Well, Tyson has taken his first steps and Sydney has started using the “big girls” potty.

Let’s start with Sydney.

My wife likes to say she is potty trained because she can sometimes go a whole day without any accidents. That’s like saying Justin Bieber has matured because he hasn’t done anything stupid or annoying in a week. You know there’s another episode right around the corner. I say a kid is not potty trained until there are NO accidents, including sleeping through the night without a diaper.

We should have potty trained her long ago. I planned on having her trained last summer, before she turned two. But then we had the stuff with Tyson’s heart and we were consumed with that, well into this year. Potty training Sydney required focus and stamina we did not have.

We began trying this spring, but we really began in earnest in June, when my wife, a teacher, began her summer “vacation.”

I put that in quotation marks because is staying home with two children under age 3 ever really a vacation? I know there are some weekends when I walk around my disaster of a house searching for a corner to escape the screaming and crying and just pray for the sweet relief of 8-10 hours of work at the office.

  

Sydney has done pretty well since Brooke took over full time. Most days, she can make it through the day without an accident. Accidents usually happen when she is doing something fun, like playing on the iPad. She doesn’t want to stop and go to the bathroom, so she just lets loose.

On the couch. Or the floor. Or even outside on the deck.

I do not understand kids. What in the world would make you feel like it would be a good idea to wet your pants? She’s of an age where she understands consequences, so this makes no sense to me. She is consciously choosing peeing herself over walking to the bathroom.

She used to have her own little potties, one upstairs and one downstairs. She was never more than 15 feet from a potty, yet she periodically felt it easier to just go in her panties than walk over to the potty.

By the way, those little potties are kind of nasty. I’m not sure how guys who have to clean toilets for a living ever become comfortable with it. Is it like working in a casino, where after awhile, you are deaf to the clamor of the slot machines? I’m not sure I could ever get used to scraping someone else’s poop out of the toilet or regularly experiencing someone’s pee sloshing over my hands.

Now that she is on the “big girls” potty, at least I can just flush. Of course, I still have wipe duty. For some reason, my daughter has chosen daddy as her dedicated potty assistant. Lucky me. So, more often than not, I get stuck wiping while my wife gets more glamorous duties, such as turning on the right cartoon. Why can’t I get a job that requires me to sit on the couch and work the remote? I’ve been practicing for that my whole life.

I guess it could be worse. My co-worker has a 2-year-old who gets up in the middle of the night and poops in dresser drawers. How'd you like to have to clean that up? Now THAT is funny. 

Sydney’s got a long way to go. We are reading books to her about going to the potty in hopes it will stick. We cheer for her after every successful evacuation. That alone leads to some uncomfortable episodes where she will emerge from the bathroom and squeal “I did poopie!” in hopes of getting her parents and WHOEVER ELSE MIGHT BE VISITING to celebrate her with a round of applause.

Still, I think we’ll have her completely trained before her third birthday on Aug. 30.

Now, to Tyson.

Sydney was a late walker, so the fact he had not walked by age 1 was not a worry for us. Given what he had been through with his heart, we knew there would be some developmental delays, but I was prepared not to worry until he hit the 15-month mark.

To this point, he has been ahead of her in gross motor skills and behind her in verbal and intellectual skills. The boy hardly speaks more than "mama" and "dada," but he crawls around the house with the speed of a German soccer player advancing toward the goal.

The other day, I left the baby gate open and turned my back for a second, only to hear my wife yell, with some urgency, a very loud “Brian!”

Now, when your wife yells at you like this, you know you are in trouble. Either you did something wrong, or one of the kids must be rushed to the hospital.

In this case, the angst in her voice was meant for me.

“Tyson just rounded the corner of the bathroom up here while I was getting Sydney ready. He climbed the whole staircase by himself. I don’t need to tell you what could have happened if he had lost his balance!”

No, you don’t. While one part of me was proud of his ability to climb 12 steps straight up in the time it took me to wipe mayonnaise off the kitchen counter, the other part of me knew that had he gotten to step 10 or 11 and somehow lost his balance, well, we’d be taking that trip to the hospital or planning his funeral.

Of course, I felt guilty. Of course, my wife was happy to increase my sense of guilt. That’s what marriage is all about, right?

But he survived and, now, only a few days past the 14-month mark, he is walking like a drunken sailor.  His head has regular appointments with the floor and any other object within three feet, but, by God, he is walking. And there is no slowing him down.

While Sydney likes to page through a book, he likes to tear a book to pieces. While Sydney will occasionally get wrapped up in intently watching a television show, Tyson prefers to have it on in the background while he walks laps around the house. While Sydney will sit on the bed and let her daddy read to her, Tyson will attempt to dive off of the bed head first – numerous times.

First steps and first shits (in the toilet.) That's life in the Gregg household.

Consider me blessed.

Tyson the Warrior Turns 1

That picture tells it all.

Look how far my boy has come.

Tomorrow, he turns 1. With apologies to Mr. Dickens, the past year has been the best of times and the worst of times.

One year ago tomorrow, we nervously awaited the arrival of our son, Tyson. The excitement was nothing like we had experienced not even two years earlier, when Sydney arrived. This time, our stomachs were queasy at the thought of bringing our new baby into the world.

Can you imagine something so exciting being so dreadful? My wife was going to give birth to a beautiful baby boy whose life would be at risk from the second he left the womb.

We knew a few months ahead of time he would be born with a significant heart problem. The doctors told us there was a decent chance he would need life-saving surgery upon his arrival. They also told us he would require another heart surgery about 4-6 months after his birth if he was going to survive.

You can read about the drama in my earlier posts. We were ecstatic when he didn’t need that immediate surgery. We were heartbroken when he struggled to eat and develop normally and we slowly realized he couldn’t wait 4-6 months for surgery and they were going to operate when he was smaller and more fragile than they wanted. We were emotionally scarred when we turned him over to the surgeon with fear we’d never see him alive again. We were elated, then shocked, then ecstatic when he made it through the surgery and began to recover.

One year later, Tyson is leading a pretty normal life. His scar is still jagged, but fading. He still takes heart medicine every day. He’s very underweight because, prior to his surgery, drinking a bottle of milk was like running the Boston Marathon and he really never developed a like for it. 

 

But those are the only signs that he is what they call a “heart baby.”

He goes in for a complete checkup next week – his first one since last fall -- and we will see how his heart is doing. We are obviously hoping for complete healing and no further surgery.

Tyson’s biggest obstacle since heart surgery has been his weight. He had a feeding tube for the first seven months of his life. Since then, he’s had a feeding regiment of supplemented breast milk or formula six times a day. We wake him three times during the night (10:30 p.m, 2:30 a.m., 6:30 a.m.) and force fortified formula into him, often against his will.

Even with that, he struggles, especially now that he is mobile and burning calories like a Hummer burns gasoline. He should weigh about 22 pounds. He weighs slightly more than 17. That’s a pretty big deficit for a kid his age and we would not be surprised if he went on some specialized eating plan after this week’s checkup.

No feeding tube, please!!!

The Budster  --- his nickname -- is showing signs of improvement in this area. He eats solid food better than his sister. I really believe when he is able to eat anything he wants he will pack on the pounds. He seems to really like food. Let’s just hope he doesn’t like it as much as his daddy.

  

He is a bit behind in his development due to all the time in the hospital and other restrictions during those first few months. For example, Sydney could probably say a couple dozen words at 1 year old, while Tyson can't say much more than ma ma and da da.

He is, however, ahead of Sydney when it comes to moving. He isn’t quite walking, but he scoots across the floor like an Indy car driver and he can lift himself up to a standing position faster than a professional wrestler after a choreographed fall. He is always moving and loves to play the worm on the end of the hook when you are trying to change his diaper or get him dressed.

In fact, he is pretty fearless. He loves to be manhandled, flipped around and tossed in the air. He gets a good belly laugh from it.

He's a really happy kid. He wakes up with a smile on his face, giggling when he sees his dad emerge from the shower. It is almost as if he knows what he has overcome and he’s chosen to really relish every day.

He loves to watch his sister do just about anything and laughs at her like she is Jerry Seinfeld working a crowd.

Believe me, she is not that funny. But the Budster is high on life. As he should be.

  

Even his scar is slowly fading. I think it will always be a visual reminder, but I don’t think he’ll be embarrassed to take his shirt off at the beach.

The kid has come a LOOOONG way. And so have his parents. The highs and lows of the past year have been draining, but we have all that much more appreciation for him and parenthood.

I have tears welling up as I write this. I am proud of this kid. He has taken a real tough situation and kicked its ass. I remember those days in the hospital when he looked like the before part of the above picture. I cried at his pain. Now I cry tears of joy for his resilience.

Tyson is where he is because 1) he is one tough kid, 2) he had one awesome mother who wouldn't let him give up and exhausted herself ensuring he had everything he needed, 3) we live close to one of the finest children's hospitals in the world, and 4) the positive thoughts and prayers of friends, families and even strangers blessed him with healing power.

Brooke and I really didn’t know if he could make it, and the outcome has been much better than we anticipated. I really feel like I have a pretty normal kid and my dreams for the future are no longer tempered.

I know this can all change next week, or next year or when he becomes a teenager. His healed heart can tear and start to leak again. Or the altered anatomy might not result in normal function. But right now, he’s just a kid who carries around a 2-inch Old MacDonald character like it is his best friend. Or a tike who likes to crawl across the floor at warp speed, grab the remote from daddy’s hand and attempt to change the TV channels, all with a devilish smile on his face.

He acts just like his sister did when she was his age, and does things hundreds of thousands of other 1 year olds will do this weekend.

Normal is good. Normal is peaceful.

I think birthday parties for kids who don't know what is going on are silly, but even I admit tomorrow is worth celebrating. The Budster has come a long way.

Happy Birthday, Tyson. You’re a warrior.

Mom's Legacy is Secure

This blog is supposed to be about my kids. I’m going to break protocol.

It is Mother’s Day, and I want to talk about my mom.

In a way, this is still about my kids. Everything that I am can, in some way, be traced back to my mom. Every lesson I’ve learned either came from her, or was absorbed from someone else because she taught me to keep an open mind and value education. The way I conduct myself, the way I treat people, the expectations I have of others – mom, mom and mom.

I’ll pass all that down to Sydney and Tyson. They are her legacy as much as they are mine.

Diagnosed with colon and liver cancer a few months ago, my mom has been thinking about her legacy. I know this because she has asked me if I want to take ownership of some of her prized possessions. She wants things to carry on.

I will. If they mean a lot to her, they mean a lot to me. Because she means a lot to me.
 

But the most important things she will ever give me have come from the example she has been and the lessons she has taught.

Pregnant at 16, she was a divorced at 17, stuck raising me on her own. In the next six years, she’d marry again and have two more children. At the age of 27, she was twice divorced and, essentially, a single mother of three.

To that point a waitress, she came upon her single-mother status with a new job, working at a state mental institution, making a whopping $2.42 an hour. That is less than $100 a week. She’d often come home with bruises and bite marks from the patients, so she earned that pittance the hard way.

Over the next eight years, we’d live in four different places. We stayed with my grandmother, then shared apartments with a live-in babysitter or a family friend to help make the rent. The threat of eviction or the electricity being turned off constantly hung in the air. I went my whole high school career calling my girlfriend from the corner pay phone because we couldn’t afford a phone in the house.

We ate government cheese and sometimes paid for food with colorful play money called food stamps. Mom would make a big pot of potato soup or ham and beans soup and we’d eat it for a week. I remember a sixth grade class project where we chronicled what we ate for breakfast every day and I had five straight days of cake and Kool-Aid. It was my brother’s birthday week and mom had bought a big sheet cake -- every kid deserves a nice birthday -- and, well, Kool-Aid at 15 cents a pack was a lot cheaper than milk.

We went without, but mom always came through when we needed her. In sixth grade, I wanted to go to Washington D.C. with the school's safety patrol. The cost was $100. That was more than a week’s pay. I have no idea how she came up with the money, but somehow I went on that trip.

My bet is she swallowed her pride and borrowed it from a friend or a relative. In those days, my mom had three children to raise and she couldn’t afford the expense of pride. I’m known around the office and in my life for often saying the phrase “Don’t trust anyone but your mother.” I guess I say that because I’ve had one who has never let me down.

I look at how Brooke and I struggle sometimes making far more money than mom ever did. I'm amazed at how she ever pulled it off. I know we didn't have what most parents would like to give their kids, and I am sure that broke mom's heart. But when I look back at those times, I realize that we had what is really the only thing that matters: endless love.

After she got pregnant with me, my mom got her high school diploma by taking classes through the mail. She could have dropped out and been done with it, but education was important to her, even then. If you ever play Scrabble with her, or watch her do a crossword puzzle, you know not to underestimate her. She can outshine many a college graduate when it comes to vocabulary.

When I told her during my senior year of high school that I was thinking about not going to college, she went Alec Baldwin on me for being a rude, thoughtless child. We might not have had the money, she might not have known how to fill out the paperwork, I might not have made a single college visit in my whole life, but, she’d be damned if a kid with my potential was going to skip out on college.

So, I borrowed money, took advantage of grants, won scholarships and – with mom as an example -- worked up to three jobs at a time to make it through. 

 

And that decision made all the difference in the world for me. It set in motion a tremendous journalism career and follow-up public relations career. I’ve sat and talked with presidents at the White House, spent time with numerous politicians, actors and rock-and roll legends, and traveled in 38 states, as well as Mexico, Canada, France, England, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Greece, Spain and the Netherlands.

None of that is achieved without my mother. If it weren't for her, I'd still be living in Massillon, Ohio wondering if my next pay check would cover my rent payment.

If it is the wish of every parent that their child do better than they did, my mom’s wish has come true.

And that, my friends, is mom’s legacy. I know the statistics on single mothers and teen mothers, especially those who live in poverty. Their offspring have a much greater chance at failure. If my mom did nothing else during her time on earth, she was the world’s greatest mother. She’s three for three when it came to raising children who graduated high school, stayed out of the criminal justice system, avoided abusing drugs and alcohol and somehow managed to become productive members of society.

Just as important, they’re all now raising children of their own and imparting mom’s wisdom at every turn. My brother, a single father who runs his own business, does such a wonderful job I am waiting for some parenting magazine to name him Father of the Year. My sister, who has struggled with single motherhood in the same way as my mother, has handled it with the same never-say-die attitude.

And now I have Sydney and Tyson, her youngest grandchildren. I, too, will raise them with the same lessons mom passed on, either verbally or by example: “Show up for work every day, so they know they can depend on you.” “The only way you get something in life is if you earn it.” “Don’t do anything that will embarrass your family.” “Once you start something, finish it.” “If it doesn’t kill you, it makes you stronger.” “Education is the way to a better life.” “Help those who are less fortunate, because someday you could be in their shoes.”

She may not have uttered them all, but she’s sure lived each one. She taught us right from wrong and held us accountable for our actions. I know people who grew up with far more than I did but learned far less.
 

I don’t know if we will have my mom for another two months, two years or twenty years. I do know, however, that her legacy is secure.

I need look no further than the two children scurrying at my feet.