Profiles in ADD

A brief tale of how chores tend to snowball in this dispatch from Dad-world.

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Photo by Lobacheva Ina on Unsplash

I don’t intend to make kid-posting a big part of what we do here, but the slapstick nature of this latest anecdote compelled me to share.

So I was home watching my two-year-old son yesterday. He doesn’t have daycare Monday and Friday mornings, and my wife and I both work, so on Monday and Friday mornings we have to take turns, one of us working and the other trying to parent while working (with some frequent help from the grandparents, God bless them). Not a lot of work generally gets done by the home parent, as you can imagine.

This is because we switched to a new daycare a few months ago. We had switched from a very convenient daycare that was mere walking distance from the house, but that we (mostly my wife) had decided was making our son unhappy. He seemed to dread going there and always clinged on when we would drop him off. There were other signs of neglect that I was begrudgingly forced to acknowledge (more facility neglect, not child neglect; we’re not monsters). Problems left unfixed for months, employees that seemed stressed an unhappy, that sort of thing. So we switched to a newer, better daycare, supposedly, which was further away and doesn’t yet have space for him on Monday and Friday mornings. I’m sort of bitching, but I have to credit my wife, the boy genuinely seems much happier at the new place. Or maybe he was just going through a phase. Who knows? The great lesson of adulthood is that no one ever knows.

Anyway, I’m home with the boy yesterday, and he’s watching Spider-man cartoons and rolling his little motorcycle toy across my head and shoulders while I try to write a Beekeeper review. Mostly pretty easy, as work-parenting goes. Eventually he climbs down and starts finding his toys under the couch, which is of course sort of an old toy graveyard at this point. He sees his little plastic basketball down there — which is actually a shoe deodorizor shaped like a plastic basketball, originally purchased for my older stepson and his stinky shoes, but the boy long ago adopted it as his toy and I’m not going to be the one to disabuse him of that notion. Anyway, the boy sees his basketball toy down there and wants me to be the one to get it out for him.

The little plastic basketball is too deep under the couch for me to reach it with my hand, so I go grab the first long, skinny thing I can think of, which is the wooden dowel that functions like a deadbolt for the sliding windows. I get the window dowel out from the window groove and stick it under the couch. I’m using a sweeping motion with the dowel, trying to fling the little basketball back out from the graveyard through an open couch channel. Only instead of flinging it out, I end up getting the damned thing stuck, pinned behind the leg of the couch.

At this point I realize I’ll just have to bite the bullet and pull the couch away from the wall and do a proper sweep of the forgotten toy graveyard to retrieve the little plastic basketball. So I pull our fairly large sectional couch away from the wall and climb back there. The little ball is there in the forgotten toy graveyard, along with some popcorn, pennies, a cardboard Easter egg — the usual shit — and probably enough dirt, lint, crud, and accumulated pet hair to fill a red wine glass. About what I expected, but still: gross.

So I toss my son the ball and go fetch the broom and stand-up dust pan (by the way, if you don’t have a stand-up dust pan, go buy one right now — you want to kneel every time you sweep? are you insane?). I get all the crud, sand, and hair swept up lickety split, and at this point I’m feeling pretty good about myself for completing a task. I reach over the couch to set the broom and dust pan back down while I climb out from behind the couch, but instead, I clip the edge of the couch with the dust pan and drop the whole apparatus, sending every last solitary mote of crud I just swept up spilling back out of the dust pan and onto the big area rug on the living room floor.

Did I scream? Did I curse? Oh my, heavens yes. But not loudly or scarily enough to make my son cry, which I felt pretty good about. His eyes did widen a bit.

At this point I take a deep breath and accept my stupidity, climbing out from behind the couch and trudging over to the hall closet to grab the vacuum cleaner. I plug it in and start vacuuming the area rug. Hey, completing another chore, this isn’t so bad! I get kind of into it, figureing that, as long as I’m here, I might as well finish vacumming every patch of the area rug, two floor areas cleaned for the price of one. In an attempt to reach all of the rug with the vacuum, I shove the couch back a bit. I manage to expose more of the rug, but in so doing, my artless shove causes the couch to bump an end table, which happens to be where I’d set my coffee. The coffee recoils in the direction of the couch for a split second, hovering in slow motion there before changing course, tipping back the other way and depositing its contents (a nice lil’ cappucino I’d made with a lil’ cinnamon sugar on the foam to be extra naughty) all over the off-white cloth chair sitting next to the end table. The newest, least-stained chair we have in the entire house is now covered in coffee.

Additional swearing and yelling ensues. Still no crying or visible fear. The boy is a damned viking. In fact, two nights before this, he and his little buddy were running back and forth across asphalt. I figured one or both of them would trip and fall at some point, as toddlers tend to do (that they’re basically miniature drunks is a big part of their cuteness), but I never want to stop the fun while they’re in the middle of getting out all that excess energy. Eventually he did trip and fall forward, but it didn’t look so bad. “I got an ouchy,” he said when he stood up, holding out a palm.

There were no tears at this point, and I went over to kiss the ouchy. We’re still in the stage when kisses actually fix ouchies, which is going to be heartbreaking when it ends (unless he’s like 15). At first all I saw was a little spec of blood on his right palm, which was surprisingly light. I was expecting scrapes, a little road rash, whatever. Upon closer inspection, I realized the spec of blood on his right palm had actually come from his left hand, where he had somehow managed to fall in just such a way that the force of catching the top edge of his left middle fingernail on the asphalt had managed to rip the entire fingernail out from the nailbed. The nail was still hanging onto the finger by a thread, but was shifted sideways and clearly destined to fall off. Wild stuff. But we got it washed and bandaged without too too many tears, and by yesterday he was basically back to his normal self again (he was actually mostly back to his normal self by the time I got the first bandage on).

Anyway, he still had some band aids on it yesterday when I was screaming and cursing at my now-coffee-covered chair. I had to bust out the carpet cleaner and scrub down the coffee stains on the chair, then blot them with a wet rag and leave them to dry. The chair had been where I was sitting too, so I had to switch to a weird, feet-straight-out position on the chaise part of the couch to continue working. Though not for very long, as this process had taken so long to play out that it was already almost time to take him to daycare. And I still had to put all the stuff away.

From plastic basketball to wooden dowel to dust pan to vaccuum to carpet cleaner to rag, it’s amazing how the chores just multiply when you’re an ADD-addled parent trying to multitask. The days are just packed.