Stupid Parent Tricks

So, the thing is... I've been thinking about writing to David Letterman.

It's not about Stupid Pet Tricks, although my dog could be a star performer there. Among her many attributes, which include Serious Gender Confusion and the ability to poop in mid-stride on the jogging trail, Sydney apparently has been studying squirrels. Now that the acorns are falling from the trees, Syd does this thing where she hides an acorn in her mouth and sneaks it into the house. (She likes to eat them later, preferably all over my wool rug in the living room and even more preferably if the baby can later pick of a piece of chewed up acorn shell and put it in her own mouth, thus triggering Mom to leap over the couch in an effort to avoid the Heimlich Maneuver.) Syd will slink past me at the door; eyes lowered guiltily and not opening her mouth, even to smile. She seems to be saying “Acorn? What acorn? There’s no acorn in MY mouth. No siree, Bob.” and then when I grab her and pry her mouth open and the acorn drops into my hand, she puts herself in a Time Out, laying her head on my foot and becoming seriously morose until I tell her I forgive her.

Dogs are just kind of naturally funny when it comes to deception. It's like toddlers before they learn to fib. The other day I asked our three-year-old, Ana, who is a champion at stall tactics when it comes to dinner, “Ana, do you REALLY have to poop or is this a stall?” “It's a stall,” she said.

Oh.

But I digress. The point being that I think David Letterman needs a new segment on his show: Stupid Parent Tricks. This would not include dumb things we have done in the name of making our children laugh, although even one video of my husband doing the Blender Dance (a little jig he made up to ease Ana's fright over the loud blender noise) would push Dave's ratings through the roof. Whenever *I* hear the blender I come running from wherever I am just to see. It's hilarious. Ya'll should come over for a Margarita some time.

But I'm not talking about things like the Blender Dance. I'm talking about the things we do unwittingly in the course of discharging our duties as parents that just make us want to throw up our hands and yell, “A MONKEY could do a better job of raising this kid!” I came to this realization as I watched my eleven-month-old careen around the room at the speed of light and suddenly had the AHA! moment of realizing that perhaps the reason we all had less than two hours of sleep in the past forty-eight was the fact that Jane was completely JACKED on Dimetapp. I mean, that baby was wired for sound!

See, we've been passing around this terrible cold --Jane even had an ear infection from it. (You've got to love pre-school. Here we sit, four weeks into it and so far, between the four of us, we've had nine colds, two sinus infections, one ear infection and one weird rash.) Apparently, my BRAIN was stuffed up because it didn't dawn on me until about two days into treating Jane's cold with Dimetapp that just maybe she wasn't responding particularly well. It is always my hope when I give my kids cold medicine that they will SLEEP. Silly me.

I had given Jane a bottle and was upstairs putting Ana to bed for the night. When I came down, my husband looked at me and said, “Look, I think Jane's fever has broken. She's our happy baby again.” Which would have been great except, well, Jane wasn't running a fever and ten minutes before she had been on the verge of Dreamland.

So I looked.

And there was Jane, doing some version of a Chinese Fire Drill. Laps around the room, squats -- up, down, up, down-- chasing the cat, making a beeline for the dog’s water dish, pulling books off the shelves, while her dad and I stared blearily at each other, aghast. “Oh, God,” I said. “It's the Dimetapp.” And indeed it was -- lovingly added to her formula so that just when she was getting good and sleepy and having her last bottle for the night she turned into the Tasmanian Devil. She's not the greatest sleeper anyway but for some reason, Dimetapp just turns her into a perpetual motion machine. I called the doctor and he said she'd be fine but that he doesn't recommend giving babies under one year ANYTHING for colds.

Oh.

So, there we were, two people already exhausted by the demands of two sick kids and now, not only did we have a baby who looked like she wanted to party like it's 1999, but I had the lovely added guilt of knowing that I was responsible for doping my baby up like a little Judy Garland. Please shoot me.

This, of course, reminded me of another Stupid Parent Trick when Ana had just turned two. There are many such moments but I’m including this one because my friend Linda says it's too funny not to share. One night, we missed Ana's dinner window. (Ana has always had a particular window of opportunity for eating and if we miss it, she will lie down on the floor and wail loudly rather than put anything into her mouth.) Anyway, my spouse had come home early and took her to the playground and everything was so exciting that I completely forgot that she needed to eat IMMEDIATELY upon return. So, her dad thoroughly upset her by coercing her into the booster seat and she had a meltdown; a crying fit for the ages. I suggested that he go outside and take a break and then I smugly, and with the air of one who deals with this sort of thing all the time (that day's LUNCH, for example), fixed a couple of cheese and crackers and went and sat next to her and ate one, slowly and deliberately, not looking at her. She eyed me. "Ana want a cracker?" she asked hopefully. So, I gave her one and then asked her if she wanted some cheese and pretty soon we were sitting at the Little Tikes Table in the kitchen and she asked me if I would peel a fish stick for her (She doesn't like the breading. But she also won’t eat fish that’s not first COOKED in the breading so you see our predicament.) and she ate some rice. I handed her the naked fish stick. Then I said it.

"Ana, would you like to dip that in some CHOCOLATE?"

I swear I wasn't even thinking of chocolate. I meant KETCHUP. I swear I did. I opened my mouth to say "ketchup" and "chocolate" came forth. Well, as it turned out, she DID want some chocolate, thank you very much, and NO DINNER. When I tried to say "we can have some chocolate AFTER dinner", she had another crying fit. I walked outside and asked my husband to just shoot me. He went inside, gave Ana a piece of chocolate (after trying to tell her we had none, whereupon she took him by the hand and led him directly to it) and then tried the “dinner AFTER chocolate” ploy, with no success. Stupid Parent Tricks –there ya go.

But the thing is that I guess this wouldn't really work as a segment for Late Night with David Letterman because no self-respecting parent would be willing to REPEAT a Stupid Parent Trick, not even for the amusement of millions of viewers.

Unlike our dog.

Maybe I should write Dave anyway.

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Barbara Cooper is the mother of Ana (3) and Jane (eleven months). She lives in Austin, Texas and, unable to travel to Indianapolis due to a really bad cold, is treating her symptoms with Dimetapp.