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Broke Wife, Big City
Go play outside
& try really hard not to die, sweetie
By Aprill Brandon
Ah, winter. That beautiful time of year when everything dies and the
air hurts your face and your soul turns as gray as week-old snow. It’s
such a pity it only lasts four months, a mere one hundred and twenty
thousand million days too long.
On the plus side, all this miserable weather makes it damn near
impossible to leave your house, which means you and your entire family
get to stare at one another’s stupid faces nonstop as the four walls
around you slowly close in. They say murder rates spike during a heat
wave but I think that’s just because the police are finally finding all
the thawed out bodies killed in mid-February over a family Monopoly
game gone horribly wrong.
Yes, winter is always an intense time but perhaps even more so for
parents of small children. This is because:
1. All a young child wants to do, besides eat your sandwich even
though they have their very own perfectly edible and almost identical
sandwich, is play. All day. Every day.
2. These same young children have absolutely no concept of age.
Meaning they truly believe that you have as much fun playing “Put Elmo
and Mr. Empty Shampoo Bottle Inside the Empty Tupperware Bowl 679 Times
in a Row” as they do.
And this is what makes the winter so hard for parents of toddlers and
preschoolers. Because while nature deals with its four-month long case
of PMS, there is no longer any way of escaping those dreaded words…
“Mommy, will you come play with me?”
Now, don’t get me wrong. I love playing with my almost 2-year-old. It’s
downright awe-inspiring watching how his little brain works and seeing
him laugh and smile at his own creativity and knowing that the greatest
joy in his life is having his Mommy sit on the floor with him and play
“Loud Truck Runs Repeatedly Over Assorted Teddy Bears and Daddy’s Left
Boot.”
Honestly, playing with him gives me a sense of peace and contentment
that I’ve never known before. And that beautiful feeling lasts for all
of approximately four minutes before I’m checking my watch and mentally
calculating the odds of my family staging a coup and overthrowing me if
I give them leftover chicken and dumplings for the fourth night in a
row.
Seriously, have you ever played with a small child? (And it doesn’t
count if you’re getting paid for it). Time literally stops. There
you are, four games of Candyland, three puzzles and six rounds of
“Smell My Stinky Feet & Humorously Overreact” later, and you check
the time to see that no more than 7.5 minutes have passed. And yet you
haven’t even BEGUN to quench their thirst for play time. They want
more. Oh, how they want more. Always with the more and do it again and
one more time and Mommy, why are you crying?
It’s specifically for this reason that the Outside was invented.
Because no matter how wonderful of a parent you are, your threshold for
the mind-numbing boredom of child’s play will always be reached. It’s
nobody’s fault, really. It’s just our brains are wired differently.
Child brains find funny noises and repetition and spinning in circles
to be the height of entertainment. Parent brains find alcohol makes
doing all those things much, much more entertaining.
And so, we tell our beloved offspring to “Go play Outside.” Before we
kindly, but firmly, kill them. (Or, being that this is 2016, we
actually say “Go play Outside but I have to come with you because you
know some muumuu-wearing neighborhood busybody is going to call CPS the
second they suspect a child might be unsupervised even for a second but
just pretend I’m not here and go play and I’ll sit on this bench and
look at my phone and secretly judge people on Facebook.”) Because
Outside is a child’s natural habitat. It is endlessly fascinating for
children.
Except in the winter. In winter, there is no “go Outside to play.”
Hell, there’s not even a “go shovel the driveway” yet in my case,
considering my son just figured out what an elbow is yesterday. And if
you do make the ill-advised decision to let your children play Outside
in winter, you will spend 76 minutes putting outerwear on them only to
have them knock on the door 11 minutes later whining “we’re cold!” as
they unleash a frozen tsunami of dripping snow throughout your house
and leave a pile of wet wool behind that won’t dry out until June.
Anyway, what was my point? Oh yes, that if winter doesn’t end soon I’m
pretty sure I’m going to die.
Happy almost-February, everyone!
Can’t get enough of Aprill? Can’t wait until next week?
Check out her website at http://aprillbrandon.com/
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