Quick! What is the fastest way to grab your kids’ attention?
You might suggest that it’s picking up a book to read, or sneaking a bit from your chocolate stash, or even answering the telephone. Here’s one for the season.
Today I set out some Christmas lights to check the bulbs and five kids come out of nowhere and, in a twenty square foot room, all manage to converge on my little space and TROMP on the lights. Then, nine cats zeroed in on the fun and decided to tackle the twinkling, knotted mass.
“Hello! Stop standing on the lights, please!”
What is it with kids and the insatiable need to step on things? You have one toy in an otherwise immaculate living room. Your child enters the room and immediately stands on the toy. Why?
Yet they can wade through a room full of wreckage and not once step on a thing. Me? I break my neck and invent five more words for a sailor’s vocabulary just trying to cross the room to kiss my cherubs goodnight.
Forget Swiffer. Santa, I want a compact, hand-held bulldozer. And I want a laser. I want to zap things into oblivion while I’m in cleaning mode.
In my commercial for such a contraption you wouldn’t see me telling my old broom that it was fired. Bzzzt! Whap! “You’re outta there!” And then I’d shove the debris aside with my extendo bulldoze feature.
I said pick up those clothes! Bzzzt! Whap! “Oh, I’m sorry. I don’t think you’ll be wearing those jeans anytime soon, Hon.”
Beep-beep-beep. Here I come with my bulldozer shoving out the front door the shoes, socks, jacket, backpack, folder and papers that my son left in a trail from the front door to the fridge.
Beep-beep-beep. “Say good-bye to the blocks littering the hallway.” Bzzzt! Whap! “Oops, sorry cat! Stop lounging around the house, then. Look alive!”
Of course, this is just a silly daydream…the kind I have over a hot mug of cocoa while the kids tackle homework and just about every crumb of food we have left in the house.
“What’s with mom?”
“She’s having ‘the dream’ again. Wait—don’t wake her!”
“Why?”
“She might hurt herself!”
“That’s for sleepwalking, dummy.”
“I’m not a dummy! Hey, Mom! She called me a dummy! Mom? Wake up, Mom!”
“Bzzzt! Bzzzt! Bzzzt!”
“Look at what you did! Now she might be psycho for life!”
It’s getting so a mom can’t even enjoy a private little daydream anymore. Which reminds me. That’s another way to grab the attention of your children. Just take a little mental break—just a bit of quiet ‘me time’—and soon enough, they’ll be at your elbow.
“Hey, Mom. You’re doing it again. You’re not giving us 100 percent of your attention!”
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