A Feat (and Feet) for the Aged

I had a big birthday coming up and was asked what I wanted to do. Party On! Pizza, a Chuck-E-Cheese-like arcade near my childhood home complete with animatronics, greasy food and cheap prizes that "cost" thousands of tickets, closed in approximately 1997. So, I was out of ideas.

Then my parents suggested they could fly in from their home in Naples, Florida to watch the kids while Belle and I stayed at their house for a long weekend. Some warm weather in January sounded great, plus the trip would be a milestone for us: Our first vacation without kids since the middle of the Obama administration. (You had to think for a second how long ago that was, right?)

We have sent the older kids for a sleepover at my in-laws but, since our youngest was born, leaving all three behind seemed unfair to our parents. Also, Covid. These days, however, the kids are self-sufficient in their own ways and knew, if grandma and grandpa were coming to town, they would be getting some new toys and ice cream at some point during the visit. Everyone would win, so I booked our plane tickets.

Every weekend is a busy weekend with kids, which is why we left behind three pages of instructions for my parents (in large font, natch) that included times and addresses for after-school art programs, basketball, swimming and Hebrew school pickup and drop-off. Belle and I went to bed late Thursday night after making sure everything was in order and kids' lunches were packed.

We were getting picked up at 4:45 a.m. Friday morning to get to the airport and, looking back, that's when I realized this was going to be a different kind of trip. Had kids been coming on the trip, we would probably have gotten up at 3 a.m. - at the latest - to get ourselves together, make sure we had everything they needed and wake them up as close to 4:45 as possible so all we had to do was put them in the car. Instead, without kids, we rolled out of bed at 4, put on running clothes for later in the morning and brought our suitcase downstairs.

At the airport, we checked our one bag, watching sleep-deprived parents pushing strollers or carrying small children also in a daze. We took a leisurely walk to the gate and then, with time to spare, took a leisurely walk to find the nearest Starbucks. We spent the flight reading or sleeping, not entertaining a child. 

So far, so wonderful. We landed in warm weather and our long weekend away was underway. 

This is a family-friendly space, but I wanted to share some of the adult things we were able to do:

- Go out to eat after 6:30 p.m.

- Visit the pool without first spending 50 minutes applying sunscreen on everyone and packing roughly 3,529 snacks

- Not set a morning alarm

Thus relaxed, things got a little crazy. Belle wanted to get a pedicure and, capturing the you-only-live-once ethos of this trip, I decided to join her for my first one ever. We both got the basic treatment and I was trying my best not to laugh as the pedicurist manipulated my toes. Then she looked at my heels, which, admittedly, are pockmarked with dry skin despite my recent best efforts to moisturize.

"Do you want to upgrade?" she asked, pointing to the next level on the pricing sheet that included dry-skin removal and massage.

(Artist rendering of my pedicure)

I agreed, figuring there was a reason for her look of concern. That look of concern transferred to my face as she pulled out what looked like a small, handheld grater. She started to, well, grate my heels and I bounced between feeling pain, ticklish and nauseous as the shavings piled up in front of her like she was putting Parmesan on my pasta and I refused to say "when." I now know exactly what Lloyd Christmas was experiencing when he was getting his makeover. 

After what seemed like forever, I hopped out of the chair with incredibly smooth feet and felt like I was walking on clouds. I celebrated my newfound sense of adventure later that afternoon by falling asleep sitting by the pool.

Did we miss our kids? It was hard not to think about them at my parents' house because their photos (along with photos of their cousins) are plastered on almost every inch of available wall and shelf space. And we did FaceTime a few times a day to say hi. Belle wanted to make sure everything was OK at our house and pumped everyone on the other end for information. I looked to make sure no child had any sort of head wound and then went back to admiring my feet.

The kids came up during our conversations but it was nice to have a conversation without kids interrupting. We enjoyed seeing other people with their babies but were glad to be past that stage of parenting and that said babies were someone else's. In other words, we fit right in with all of the grandparents around us even as we brought down the average age of wherever we were by about 25 years.

By Sunday morning, we could have stayed another week in the warm weather but also were ready to get home and see the kids. The look of excitement on their faces when we walked through the front door, those first hugs and kisses - that was the best birthday present I could ask for. 

The ice cream cake they bought me was pretty good, too. 

Babysitters Club

"Do you think that's enough?" Belle asked.

She was eye-level with our kitchen counter, looking at a Pyrex measuring cup with vodka in the bottom.

"Sure," I replied, totally not sure if she had half-a-shot or three in front of her.

She poured another splash in the Pyrex and then dumped the alcohol into a Yeti tumbler filled with orange juice. 

We were a little out of practice when it came to pre-gaming but we had an excuse: three kids under 8 and a pandemic. Now, for the first time in three years, we were going to a concert. Even more monumental, we were awaiting the arrival of a babysitter watching the kids who wasn't a grandparent.

Growing up, I remember being excited when my parents would go out on a Saturday night, leaving my brother and I with a babysitter. We would eat pizza, play games, watch TV, maybe stay up until 8:30. I couldn't believe my parents would miss out on such a good time! Who wants to eat dinner after 7 p.m., I thought, or dress up in fancy clothes for fun? 

Pre-coronavirus - and pre-three kids -  Belle and I would have the grandparents babysit every once in a while so we could go out to dinner. The oldest kids were younger and, in some cases still nursing, so we might have left the house after their dinner so all grandma and grandpa would have to do was get them ready for bed. 

Once we were out, however, I understood why my parents - why any parents - valued a good, reliable babysitter. We might have checked the crib monitor once or twice. And the conversation, despite our parents' admonishments, occasionally turned to the kids. But to be able to travel without a diaper bag or buckling someone into a car seat, to eat a meal without getting up 20 times for one reason or another, to have someone clean up the table after you: all parents need a break, even if it's just for a few hours.

COVID and having an infant obviously limited our ability to go out. We would sometimes have grandparents come over during a weekend day for a spell, because nothing says "romance" like a trip to the Verizon store to get new iPhones. 

So I was excited about going to the concert but felt a pinch of anxiety. Bedtime is such a highly calibrated dance, and explaining the routines to someone new felt like trying to make someone an expert on quantum mechanics in an hour. Plus, it had been a busy week and were going on vacation two days later; a night home packing and going to bed at a decent hour sounded pretty good. Speaking of sleep, there's also that cruel math after a night out - you get less shut-eye while the kids still get up at the same (early) time.

But excuses are like diaper pails: they both stink. So the kids got late-afternoon showers and baths and we had an early-evening pizza dinner, reminding them for the 478th time that we would not be around for bedtime. Belle's aunt has watched the kids before and she arrived guns blazing, the "guns" in this case belated birthday gifts for the oldest kids and another toy for our youngest. The kids immediately forgot about us, and we were on our way.

The concert was a lot of fun, even if by around 10 p.m. I might have looked at my watched and yawned. We checked the baby monitor once to see our youngest passed out on her bed. Belle's aunt told us, when we got home, that our youngest went to sleep early, while our older kids stayed up a little later. The kids were great, she said, and she offered to babysit again whenever we wanted her to. 

After a stress-free night out, in a post-concert glow, we might have asked if she were available tomorrow. But we thanked her and agreed we would take her up on her offer at some point in the future. 

Hopefully, by then, we'll have a shot glass.

Potty talk

Loyal readers of this space (hi, Mom!) might remember I wrote last time about a milestone in child-rearing and the word "poopybutt." Today, I write about another milestone in child-rearing that involves poop on butts.

That's right: After eight years, Belle and I have changed our last dirty diaper.

Thank you, Molly Matthews, for all of your help.

We had been dreaming about this moment but it happened so suddenly. Our youngest had shown interest in using the bathroom but we hadn't yet mustered the energy to begin full-on potty training. And then her daycare told us its latest "Potty-Training Boot Camp" was approaching and she would be a good candidate. 

At the conclusion of the one-week program, we were told, she would wake up from her Friday nap and have a diaper retirement party. From that point on, we were only to put her in a diaper for a nap or at bedtime. I'm pretty sure it wasn't coincidental that this particular Friday was the one before Memorial Day weekend, giving her extra time to work out the kinks at home. Still, daycare had us at "we'll potty-train her." 

The concept of changing diapers did not faze me prior to having children, although I was worried about getting peed/pooped on. But then my oldest had that meconium diaper in the hospital and I quickly became an expert, even if I still got peed on occasionally.

Like most parents, we've changed diapers in the backs (and fronts) of cars, in restaurants, in public bathrooms up and down the East Coast, at parks and playgrounds. We've struggled to keep the kids still as we wiped them and doused clothes in OxyClean after a blowout. We've wondered how someone so little, so cute, could produce something so heinous in their pants. I've emptied our diaper pail thousands of times, the smell that wafts up as the trash bag wriggles free from the bin permanently etched in my nostrils.  

When our oldest was potty training, she used a miniature, plastic toilet with a bag at the bottom. We would alternate reading two books while she sat, one an interactive Elmo story where you finally learn that, despite appearances, Elmo does, in fact, wear underwear. The other is titled "Big Girls Use the Potty," featuring a child named Molly Matthews. Before opening "Big Girls" for the first time, I was very confused how a book illustrating a girl using the bathroom did not end up on some school district's banned list. Turns out Molly's stuffed animal "uses" the potty.

Since then, I can't begin to estimate how many times I've sat on a bathroom floor to read those books, how many times I applauded and cheered a bowel movement as if my child won an Oscar, nor how many M&Ms we've given our kids after a mission accomplished.

Our son received an ultimatum when he was almost two-and-a-half: Either your diapers or your pacifier has to go. He kept on sucking and pretty much trained himself in less than a week. To this day, however, I still have to remind him regularly to watch where he's aiming while peeing. At least, living with three ladies, he learned at a young age to put the seat down. He's also discovered the joy and freedom of outdoor urination, and would rather go behind a tree in the backyard than trudge the whole 20 feet inside to the bathroom.

For our older kids, we were with them the entire time they potty trained. For our youngest, all we really knew was she had circle time daily with the other children potty training. "Use potty, get a cookie," she told us each night that week when we asked how training was going. When she came home that Friday, we looked at each other as if to say, "I guess we're really doing this?" We decided she would wear a diaper over her underwear in the car but otherwise followed daycare's instructions. 

There were multiple accidents that first weekend, of course. We went through five pairs of underwear on Saturday alone thanks to a juice box and lots of running around during a barbecue. But after that first weekend, she's really taken to it, even waking up most mornings with a dry diaper. 

We still have to ask her occasionally if she needs to use the bathroom but more often than not she tells us. The sly smile that crosses her face when she hears the tinkle in the bowl always makes me smile. One night, when she had to go No. 2 twice in a half-hour, she informed me very excitedly during her second trip, "I found more poop."

Our diaper shelf in the garage only has a box of nighttime diapers left and the diaper pail sits mostly empty in her room.

I'm not going to miss the diapers, just the little kids that wore them.

Crib Notes

Two-year-olds rarely say things that totally change your world. My daughter, for example, has learned to say "poopy butt" thanks to her brother. But one day recently, she woke up and informed Belle that "my bed is too high."

Her "bed" was a crib and her declaration marked the end of an era: eight years, five sheets, three kids, two mattress covers, thousands of nights of Belle and I standing over the crib's front railing, sometimes rubbing backs, many times just pleading with a baby to JUST GO TO SLEEP.

I built the crib in the spring of 2015, trying to make myself useful in Belle's third trimester before our oldest arrived. Each time we put a newborn in the crib for the first time, the baby looked like a raft in the ocean. And each time, it was hard to believe that one day, not too far away, they would look like a yacht in a backyard swimming pool.

I assumed parenting would be a day-to-day adventure filled with highs and lows. What I was less prepared for was the night-to-night roller coaster. The morning I'm writing this sentence, for example, my almost-5-year-old son came to our room twice between 3 a.m. and 4 a.m. so I could tuck him back in after he went to the bathroom.

To be fair, all of our kids were pretty good sleepers when we first put them into the crib. When other parents asked how any of the babies were sleeping, I always felt a little bad saying they slept 10 hours straight, especially if the other parents described being up all night with their children. But there is no better feeling as a parent of a baby than waking up in the morning slightly confused after a night of uninterrupted sleep and realizing your child did not wake up once. (What I wouldn't give for a night like that today.)

After experimenting with a bassinet with our eldest upon returning from the hospital, we put our other kids in the crib as soon as we came home. I have spent seemingly half my life on a nursery room floor, waiting to help with a diaper change or teeth brushing before a baby was put in or returned to the crib. There is no look as precious as a baby in a milk coma, a punim that recharges you as a parent and melts away any frustration from the day.

Eventually, and unfortunately, all babies hit a sleep regression. For our eldest daughter, it was when she would no longer be swaddled for bedtime. I do remember at least one night where I drove her around in her car seat until she passed out, then brought the car seat into our room. She would require back rubs or someone to sit in her room until she fell asleep; good luck trying to tiptoe out if she were still awake.

We got her a toddler bed for a change of scenery but she refused to use it. She did use a sleeping mat, so long as I was lying next to her, starting around age 2. Almost every night, I would spend at least 30 minutes in her room, until she would fall asleep. And, almost every night, she would come into our room to sleep in our bed. Belle and I knew we shouldn't have let her but, when it was 2 a.m. and we were already sleep-deprived, we just hoped she would grow out of this stage quickly. We didn't expect it would take almost three years.

Belle will never let me forget the time, when our son was home for his first night, she found me fast asleep next to our daughter while she was waiting for me to help with his bedtime. (NOTE: I originally started the preceding sentence as, "One night, soon after we brought our son home..." She read that and was angry at me for forgetting and also angry at me again for falling asleep.) When he was a few months old, I was on the floor in his nursery with him early one morning, trying to coax him back to sleep. I put him on his stomach and he passed out, and that was the day he became a stomach sleeper in his crib, a position everyone advises against. Thankfully, child protective services never came for us, and he slept well in the crib until we moved him to his "big boy" bed before our youngest was born.

By that point, our older children were pros at sleeping in their beds. Our biggest concern was making sure our youngest didn't wake them up with her crying for her middle-of-the-night feedings and they didn't wake her up in the morning as they moved around upstairs like a herd of elephants. When our youngest realized she could stand up in her crib in the morning, our older kids would enjoy climbing into her crib, leaving us wondering why they couldn't have been as enthusiastic being in there when they were her age.

The weekend after our youngest announced her bed was too high, she watched as a I took apart the crib and then was excited when we brought the toddler bed into her room. She put her stuffed animals and dolls on one end and gleefully flung herself on the mattress. Most nights, she lays down and, with a few back rubs, sleeps through the night. More recently, however, there have been nights where she needed a longer back rub and for me to sit with her until she falls asleep.

Part of me enjoys this quiet time, knowing this will be my last chance to do this and, in just a few years, the only time I'll be with my kids while they're sleeping is when I'm trying to drag them out of bed so they get ready for school. Watching your child fall asleep peacefully, feeling safe and secure because you are next to them, reminds you of the joy and fulfillment of being a parent.

But then you remember that, once you get downstairs, there are dishes to clean and toys to put away and probably a night of being awakened for some reason. And you can think only one thing: Poopy butt. 

Taken for a Ride at Disney World

Minnie Mouse and three of her fans.

When I was younger, I made two fashion-related promises to myself:

• I will never purchase all-white New Balance sneakers
• I will never be part of one of those families that wears matching shirts in Disney World

So I was surprised how not-mad I was to be wearing a T-shirt with The Beast in sunglasses and the word "Dad" below it, posing for a photo with the family first thing in the morning at the Magic Kingdom, with Cinderella's Castle behind us. Kids have a funny way of changing your perspective.

(Since you're wondering, Belle's shirt had Belle on it, natch; my older daughter's had Ariel; my younger daughter's had Minnie; and my son chose Darth Vader. Should he become a serial killer, we'll know where it came from.) 

We, along with my parents, spent two-and-a-half days at The Happiest Place on Earth Except for Your Bank Account. Let's get that out of the way: Disney is expensive, although I thought it was a bit excessive when Donald Duck grabbed my wallet during one of the 3-D shows.

Making it better (or worse) is all transactions at Disney can be done through an app or a wristband, so you don't feel like you're spending anything. Many dads (and they were all dads) wore shirts calling themselves "Human ATMs" or that had the word "broke" in the famous Disney font. You really can't put a price on happiness, I guess, until you see your next credit card statement.

Perhaps it wasn't surprising, then, that Disney shows a little mercy and allows Instacart deliveries to people staying on their properties. Belle took advantage of this to get snacks for the parks and to make quick in-room breakfasts each morning. I was skeptical -- there are few things I enjoy more than a hotel breakfast -- but, as usual, Belle was right. Because a day in a Disney park starts early and requires the planning of a high-risk military maneuver and the mental fortitude of a Navy SEAL.

My day started at 6 a.m., when I paid $18 per person via the app just for the right to attempt to jump the line for a given attraction at a given time. At 7 a.m., we had to pick our first "Lightning Lane" ride, and that time window would determine how we mapped out the rest of the day. The app also gives approximate wait times for all shows and rides in a park, and we tried to find attractions with lines no longer than 45 minutes. So, between the Lightning Lane RSVPs, monitoring wait times at other attractions and ordering food for pickup, I spent approximately 80% of my time in Disney with my head down, glued to my phone.

Another 15% of my time was spent waiting in line to take pictures with characters. But all of the kids went home happy: my oldest got photos with princesses; my youngest was overjoyed to see Mickey, Minnie and friends; and, my son, in what is probably a top-three moment of his life so far, met Darth Vader. If Ron DeSantis wants to make more Disney-related laws in Florida, he needs to ban adults without children waiting in line to take photos with the characters. I will grant an exemption to recently married or engaged couples so long as they are wearing T-shirts indicating their relationship status.

But that other 5% of my time in Disney, I had a blast going on rides and watching the kids have the trip of their lives. And that's the thing about going to Disney World: It's fun! The days are long (and we even were back in our rooms before dinner) and there is a lot of walking and navigating crowds. But somehow the excitement of a two-minute ride sustains you long enough until you get to the next attraction. (Parent tip: Rent or bring enough stroller seats for each child. We would not have survived without my parents bringing their umbrella stroller to go with the two-seater rental I schlepped in both parks.)

My concerns about our youngest having meltdowns never materialized, and when she was tired or there was a ride she couldn't go on, my parents would simply walk her around in the stroller. The kids' enthusiasm never waned, and they each had their favorite attractions while also at least pretending to enjoy what their siblings liked. (I'm specifically thinking of the second ride we took on It's a Small World for my youngest.) They already are talking about what they want to see and do during our next visit, and it will be fun to see how their love of Disney will change as they grow older.

By then, I'll probably be in a market for new shoes. And those New Balances sure do look comfortable.