Little kids are just like teenagers, only smaller

My good friend Laurie Sontag at Manic Motherhood wrote this http://lauriesontag.com/?p=846 brilliant post last week about how teenagers are just like three year olds only bigger. It got me thinking, little kids are just like teenagers, only smaller…

They don’t speak, they grunt

Son number two, who is yet to perfect the art of speech, usually gets his point across with a series of “urr urr urrrrrr”’s and “nnn, nnn nnn’s”, often as a request for food. Son number one, a little older, regularly forgets his manners and morphs into Kevin. “Get me a drink” “Turn the telly over” “Come here now” are favourite demands. But right now, while they are little, I am willing to make the effort. I say the usual “what’s the magic word?” before answering their command. But after years of thankless slavery as a mother and being talked to like a piece of crap, I am waiting for the day when I can grunt back “Piss off and get it yourself. I’m not your slave anymore.”

They are more like you than you think

Fighting a stubborn two year old is hard enough without your mum merrily pointing out that you used to make the exact same face when you refused to put your shoes on. And I know there will come a time when my kids come home with a bizarre haircut that I can’t stand and mum will be at the ready with the picture of me with an elfin crop that I thought was so Demi Moore at the time, but in hindsight made me look like the Star Wars kid from You Tube. But tiny kids are just little mini me’s. Last week BFF was stunned when her son, also two, responded to her presentation of a flannel to wash his face with the much used mummy expression “don’t even think about it”. You can’t really argue with that.

They never sleep when you want them to

After a few years of motherhood you soon forget what it actually feels like to go to bed and wake up feeling refreshed and renewed. Little kids often can’t sleep through the night because they’re “scared”; want a drink or need to express more random requests like an overwhelming desire to sleep on the floor rather than in their bed. I relish the thought of the moment they want to sleep all day, and I honestly won’t care whether it’s in their bed or on the floor. Just being able to sleep past 5am is a luxury I am quite excited about. But as one friend recently pointed out, teenagers are no different from little kids except their routine is back to front. They stay up all night, then spend the entire day in bed when you want them to get up and clean their stinking pit of a bedroom. Which brings me to…

They are minging

Little boys are gross. They are gross from the minute they discover they can pick up all manner of hideous things with their curious little fingers, and then drop them when something more interesting comes along, right through to teenagers who wear the same pants day in day out and never clean behind their fingernails. I have given up wishing for a perfectly clean and tidy home, but there are times when I try to regain control. I once found a crusty old cheerio behind a load of books, encased in a deep layer of dust and of indeterminable age, but this didn’t detract son number two from swiping it up and happily munching away on it. There was a smell I couldn’t quite place coming from under the TV cabinet, so, approaching with caution, I investigated. I discovered, along with Mummy Pig and Miss Rabbit, 2 small plastic soldiers and a couple of dice (or die, whatever); a mouldy apple with two bites taken out of it, a vast amount of dust and I kid you not, a chocolate chip cookie stuck to the wall, defying gravity. Learning from the Cheerio incident, I kept son number two well away from the freak cookie and only narrowly saved him from feasting on the mouldy apple. Which brings me to my next point.

They will happily eat crap, but refuse a lovingly prepared healthy and delicious meal

No one wants to have fussy children, so we all work really hard in the early days filling our freezers with millions of tiny frozen cubes of liver casserole, salmon mash and a vast array of vegetable cocktails. But then suddenly your lovingly prepared meals are met with a solemn shake of the head and a bizarre list of rules; nothing can touch on the plate, nothing white, I don’t like potatoes I only like chips, I’ll eat cheese but only on pizza, I will only eat peas on a Wednesday, etc. Similar to teenagers who refuse your meals before rustling up random and disgusting concoctions in the toastie maker, then leave you to clean it up.

So yes, teenagers and little kids are very similar indeed. But at the moment I can always ask for a kiss or a cuddle and get one, and snuggle up on the sofa with them in front of innocent telly programmes, soaking up their adorable cuteness. Can’t see them letting me cuddle up to them when they are trying to watch Cribs and eat their tinned spaghetti and banana toasties.