Little Kids, Big City: Tales from a Real House in New York City (With Lessons on Life and Love for Your Own Concrete Jungle) (19 page)

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Authors: Alex McCord,Simon van Kempen

BOOK: Little Kids, Big City: Tales from a Real House in New York City (With Lessons on Life and Love for Your Own Concrete Jungle)
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Simon
Not long after François was born I remember visiting a children’s store in the Hasidic section of Crown Heights to use a gift certificate we’d been given by a friend who lived in the area. We’d already accumulated all the things we thought we’d need for our new little baby so at this store we decided to buy things we’d need later on, or so we thought. And so it was in late 2003 we bought a wooden gate to be affixed at the top of stairs. It went unused and was still in its box until we sold it via a parents’ Listserv in 2008. And that toddler gate just about sums up my view about childproofing our home—we didn’t. Yes, at about 14 months old while descending the stairs, François tumbled down the last four or so, but he learned that he needed to be careful on stairs and has never fallen again. While François has been to ER for stitches on two occasions, out of our visits there, neither boy has ever had an accident in the home that required medical attention. Have we been lucky? Sure, but we also have always striven to ensure that our boys understood the dangers around them.
 
Alex
The main rule we employ is that the children are allowed to touch things as long as they are gentle and we supervise. We’ve tried to instill in them a respect for valuables and nice environments. After completing our living room and dining room renovation, the boys were in awe of the finished product for a little while. They quickly made themselves at home and could see the difference between the previous mess and the current well-put-together rooms. Consequently, it really hasn’t been difficult at all to get them to keep their food and drink on the table and off the sofas, to take off their shoes before jumping on chairs and to enter the house downstairs through the mud room if they’re muddy, soggy or sticky. They wash their hands when they come into the kitchen, knowing that I’ll let them “help” me if they do. They appreciate and respect valuables, though the tradeoff has been that they constantly lose game pieces. If it comes down to it, I’d rather lose checkers than cufflinks. One kind of funny thing I noticed recently is that the toys the boys tend to leave upstairs in our red and black living room often tend to be red and black as well. I’m not sure whether that’s intentional, but it’s funny that the room always seems to match regardless of its contents. They’ve also amassed a few valuable things themselves—last summer they picked up some beautiful seashells when visiting friends in the Hamptons. Both François and Johan carefully keep the shells in baskets and handled them with more care than I’ve ever seen them use with their other treasures.
I know there will be hiccups along the way. There will be broken glasses, gouged floorboards, chipped tiles and yanked strings. I remember being much older than they are now and shinnying up a doorway, crouched ready to drop down onto the unsuspecting shoulders of my brother or mother’s friends. There were so many crazy things I used to do, including tying my Barbie dolls to misappropriated yarn and rappelling them up and down the freshly polished wooden staircase. One time I proudly tried on my brand-new puffy snow parka and leaned against the glass doors of a friend’s fireplace, only to discover that the back of the parka melted and left a gaping hole in the coat and a sticky, impossible to clean mess on the fireplace door.
When we leave the house, New York City surrounds us and it’s very different than the places Simon and I grew up. When I was six there were no taxis to avoid when crossing the street, no bicyclists careening across a bridge and nearly hitting me, no tourists walking five abreast on a city sidewalk. In the city the kids ride on our shoulders quite a bit more than we ever did with our parents, in order to see above the crowds on Fifth Avenue during the holidays. At their age I barely registered that there were other cars on the road, much less commented on other people’s driving skills. The other day someone cut Simon off on the Brooklyn Bridge and as he swore, François piped up, “That’s a bad word, Daddy, but it’s OK because he was a really stupid driver,” which reminds me that eventually we’re going to have to teach them to drive. Maybe we’ll do that in Australia—I can’t imagine being able to make the mistakes I did learning to drive in Kansas, on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn. Ultimately our philosophy of childproofing comes down to this—we try to keep them safe whenever we can. We teach them to respect their surroundings and objects and after that, we don’t cry over spilled milk or Chardonnay.
TOP 10 CRAZIEST PLACES WE’VE FOUND OBJECTS:
 
10. Remote control car key one piece found in a child’s rain boot in his closet the other piece wedged in the radiator
9. Valid American Express card in François underwear drawer
8. Batteries in the cat food jar
7. Plastic taxicab found in a puddle on the bot tom of the oven after I preheated it to 500 degrees to make pizza
6. Magic marker on a painting where some body (I still don’t know who) added a tail to a previously tailless dog
5. Unused monthly subway pass worth about in a toy cash register in the playroom
4, Important business cards from network ing meetings found in washing machine after going through a cycle in a kid’s jeans pocket
3. Cat’s toothbrush carefully placed in the family toothbrush holder in the master bathroom We replaced all human ones after that discovery
2. Used nighttime transition diapers, in the laundry basket.
1. Simon’s best watch… missing for the last four months If you come over and happen to see it will you let us know?
 
 
Chapter 12
 
Raising Baby Einsteins
 
The Race to Offer Your Children Every Advantage
 
Baby videos really are addictive. No way do they make your two-month-old smarter, despite the spin on the packaging. Though apparently some parents really believed that and consequently got their money back. The videos certainly do help stressed out parents relax and keep themselves from stamping the baby’s forehead “return to sender.” At some point in your sleep-deprived stage you’ll find a screaming or wide-awake infant at 3:30 in the morning or some ungodly hour, and put on one of those classical music baby DVDs. We absolutely double-dog dare you not to be completely transfixed by the calming waves set to Handel’s
Water Music
. We firmly believe that they are as soothing for the frazzled new parent as they are for the child. When you’re so exhausted that you begin to wonder who you are, and if it would be OK to just cry along with the baby, pop in a video. Pour yourself a gin as well if you think that will help. You will slowly be transported into a happy place, even more so if it’s four o’clock in the morning. Just be sure to not drop the baby. Where’s that vibrating bouncy chair?
 
Alex
After François was born I found myself kind of annoyed by people who preach “tummy time,” and make weird faces to babies. I also thought that the whole teaching-babies-sign-language thing had to be a scheme dreamed up by ASL experts who wanted to sell classes to easily influenced new parents. Babies may be able to make a sign with their hands, but what are they going to tell you other than, “I’m happy, I’m sad, change my diaper, I’m hungry”? I’m not convinced they have the emotional maturity to choose which sign to make, and I’d rather figure it out myself by process of elimination rather than trying to teach a pig to fly—not that I think my kids can fly…
There’s a product out there for every type of neurosis a first-time parent might have, whether it’s sign language, baby videos or stupid Velcro thingies that are supposed to help you swaddle a baby. Incidentally, our boys hated being swaddled and would squirm, kick and carry on until they were free. They loved the really loose sleep sacks, but swaddling? “No, thank you, Mommy!” “Uh-uh, Daddy! Leave me alone!” Living in the city, where there tend to be a lot of neurotic people anyway, there are many parents who fill up their narrow townhouses or tiny apartments with every bloody thing they can buy, hoping that they’ll find the one magic product that turns their child into the best student in preschool, or just keeps them from screaming through the night. We were no better at this than anyone else—there are loads of things (like swaddlers, diaper pad covers, pacifier holders) we bought with François that we never used. We also got sucked into the talking toy madness. You know the educational ones where you push a button or turn a page and they talk to you? We get annoyed by them, but kids love them, and if you throw them across the room in frustration, they are big and heavy enough to break something (so you can’t do that). One thing we did to ease the pain was to insist that if a talking toy came into our house, it had to speak a foreign language or speak English in an accent other than American. Consequently we speak to our irritating toys in French, Italian or Spanish: “Jouet avec moi!” “Buona Sera, Ragazzi!” “Hola, mis amigos!” My personal favorite is the British farm animal toy that features a male voice (think Hugh Grant) deadpanning, “I’m a cow. I eat grass.” That one is kind of fun to listen to after the children are in bed and we’ve had a few glasses of Champagne. There’s also a phone with colored shapes that says, “Red Circle,” but the overly chipper Mary Poppins-ish voice sounds like she’s saying, “Red Psycho.” Even Johan thinks so. These days François likes to sneak up behind people and turn on the Italian one so that it abruptly starts counting, “Uno, due, tre,” and then run away giggling.
Sometimes after Johan was born I’d wheel him to the park and let him sleep while François played. I would overhear mothers talking about gross motor skill development, which of course is important, but do we need to obsessively monitor every developmental move of our children? Can he pick up a piece of pasta and shove it in his ear? Great, his manual skills are on track. Can he express himself clearly enough to scream, “Mommy, wipe my bottom!” and do I understand him? Fantastic, his speech is as it should be. Is Johan able to snatch toys away from his big brother and land a punch on his nose without missing? Perfect aim—these boys are going to develop beautifully. There are moms I know who test their children constantly and rely on outside opinions to tell them what to do to make their kids stronger, faster and better. Do I want my kids to fall behind? Of course not! Do I think that they may well learn better and faster by my playing creative games with them rather than sitting them down and cramming for standardized tests? Yes.
 
Simon
As someone who loved learning more when not in a super structured environment, I started challenging François and then Johan to be aware of what is around them by incorporating the things we saw into seemingly innocuous questions. Often when walking with them I would ask them to find patterns in things, to identify numbers and letters on building signs and so forth. Also my 10 fingers get a constant workout, as I am always using them to teach simple addition, subtraction, multiplication and division—of course with never actually using those terms. After doing this for a little while I no longer have to prod either of them to look around them, as they just seemed to start pointing out to me the shapes, letters and numbers that they saw, and even the differences in accents between Alex and me.
Simon: What’s that street sign say?
François: Court Street
Simon: How is your age similar to the number of letters in the street’s name?
François: (Thinks for a minute.) Oh, I am five and “C-o-u-r-t” has five letters in it!
Johan: Daddy is that like “one two three four, five, once I caught a fish alive”?
Simon: (Laughing) Only in England or Australia —Mommy doesn’t say it that way Court and caught are antonyms
Johan: Huh? Is that like bugs?
Simon: Nevermind—we’ll get to that later
 
Alex
Let’s talk about Mommy and Me classes. I think they’re a good idea, but not really for teaching anything. I think parents should absolutely sign up for a music class at six months so that you and your baby have somewhere to go and meet other babies and moms. Did François or Johan participate and clap along to the music? Nope. Absolutely not at that age. It turns out that Johan was more interested in music classes than his older brother, and he caught on by about 18 months. François, on the other hand, didn’t take to music much but in art class would spend the entire period painting one masterpiece. Fair enough. When they were babies they both liked to try and shove all the musical instruments into their mouths. Teachers are usually prepared for this and have a supply of wipes on hand—when you finally pry the shaky eggs from your drooling baby’s mouth, give them a wipe and you’re good to go. These classes are fun for moms to socialize and secretly make fun of other people’s children, but that’s about it. I’m glad I started early so that I had something to do, and once they were old enough to participate more fully, I knew all the teachers and had a better idea of what they would really like. After a few years of going to the same wonderful studio, we worked out that Johan likes music with English- or French-speaking teachers, and François likes art or physically active classes in English only—for French he prefers a class purely about learning the language. Along the way we made lots of friends and both their caregivers and I had fun. Everyone wins!

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