Admittedly, I can be pretty intense with Cate. She goes to a quiet room by herself, not the foyer to play, when she misbehaves at church. She sits in a regular chair, not a high chair, at restaurants. And, until recently, she didn't sleep with anything because I didn't want her to need a crutch to fall asleep.
I'm big in to her doing what she can for herself, which at this point includes being in charge of putting the dish towels away, getting her own dishes for meals, putting her used dishes in the sink, wiping off the table after dinner, putting her clothes away in drawers, emptying the trash from her room, bringing the brush and dustpan when I'm sweeping, and keeping track of her own shoes. More recently, she's learned to Swiffer (seriously, I showed her once and she did the whole front room!) and she's taken on a whole host of chores on Peter's behalf, including pacifier monitor, bottle picker-upper, and post-burp face wiper (not to mention chief entertainer).
But for a whole variety of reasons my own childhood was essentially void of whimsy, and I'm determined that will not be the case for Cate and Peter. We dance almost every day. We clap and squeal when the postman delivers our mail (Cate gets all the window envelopes and advertisements, her "paperwork"). We make silly faces. I can hardly wait till Cate understands sprinkles so that we can put them on everything. I've got big plans for finger painting with pudding and popping popcorn in the middle of the room with the air popper lid off and eating dessert first sometimes. And for a surprise hookey day during the school year when they each get to skip school and have their own all-day fun-packed date with Mom and Dad. We're big in to applause and giggles and high fives and tickles and hiding and chase.
And ... I let her spill her water pretty much wherever she wants. It's just water. We live in Houston, where it's always hot. We only have carpet in one room, and a tiny bit of water isn't going to hurt the carpet. When she spills it on linoleum or hard wood, she immediately gets a towel and cleans it up herself. I can't resist her squeals of delight when she pours it on her head. It's so cute when she splashes her hands in her tiny indoor puddles. And for all my intensity, in those moments when we are both splashing our hands in that tiny bit of water on the floor, I get to be my low-key Cool Mom alter ego. We both think this is great fun.
I had never given any thought at all to how this might play ... at someone else's house ... or with another toddler over. Until today. When I had a mom friend and her toddler over and I gave each of the girls about a three tablespoons of water in matching cups and Cate spilled a little. "Eh, you choose your battles, and that's not one I fight..." I said cheerfully, showing as much low-key, go-with-the-flow Cool Mom aloofness as I could muster. My low-key Cool Mom friend shrugged and smiled and I thought how nice that were both so totally, you know, Cool. And then Cate got the look of anticipatory delight she gets on her face every time just before she dumps the water all over herself. And then she dumped it. "Whoa," my low-key Cool Mom friend said, "that was totally deliberate, wilful spilling!" "And," she said, turning to her own 20-month-old, "We are not going to copy that, are we?"
Uh, low-key Cool Mom fail.
But here's the thing: I'm pretty sure one of the purposes of parents is to give the next generation something to stay up late talking with college roommates about, or to pass the time chatting about on a long road trip with a future spouse, or to pay a therapist $150 an hour to listen to sometime in their late 20s when self awareness and discretionary income hit their first peak simultaneously.
And for all the stuff we'll undoubtedly give her to talk about, there's one thing my Cate won't be saying: "I wish my mom had let me have a little fun. You know, I just wish she would have let me spill some water on the floor and play in it every now and then!" Not on my watch.
