Pandemic Nerf Darts

I have started to write this blog so many times over the last three weeks. I just don’t have any time to sit down with my laptop during the day, and when I finally do get the time in the evenings, like after The Others are in bed, I’m just so tired. 

And at the end of any given day, I couldn’t even tell you what actually happened that day. It’s always some blur of homeschooling and lunch-making and tantrums and cleaning up messes and dinner-making and laundry and more tantrums.

There are a thousand ups and downs in a single day, just like there are a million ups and downs in a single week. My prime writing time, when my energy and focus and creativity peak, is usually in the morning, but that’s not jiving with our Quarantine schedule.

I mean, don’t get me wrong—I am one of the manyparents with school-aged kids who has torn up the ambitiously naïve homeschooling schedule I made a few weeks ago. My frustration with my kids—turns out they’re not as smart or dutiful as I thought they were—has been compounded by a lack of sleep, thanks to Lou, who has three new teeth coming in and also didn’t poop all last week. 

What was once: “And then we’ll have story time, and art class, and then we’ll go for a walk in the park to look for unicorns and rainbows…” has become “Oh good Lord, just finish your damn math assignment and then you can have screen time! Just put down numbers, I don’t care!” In other words, our pandemic mood is… well, there’s no single mood, but it’s often “Irritable.”

But still, mornings are for homeschooling, which means lots of me frantically snapping “Nate, do your work… Nate, get back to work… Nate, stay focused… Sam? Where’s Sam?... What? No, Tess, I really don’t want to play ponies with you right now… Lou! Did you poop? Nope, still no poop.” 

And Zoom meetings. Lots of Zoom meetings. 

Moreover, I’m simultaneously trying to make my coffee and feed Lou and put Lou down for his morning nap and scoop up all the Legos and Nerf darts and other infant choking hazards that pollute the floor. And keep Tess away from our bedroom, aka Tighe’s home office, where Tighe’s usually on a call or deeply focused on his spreadsheets. 

And if I let go of any single responsibility, it’s that. 

Somehow Tess drifts away from me, frustrated that I won’t read her a book or play ponies with her, and she makes her way to the floor of our bedroom closet where she’s created an entire ecosystem of anything she can find. Like pens and paper clips and scraps of paper and bracelets from my jewelry box and tiny washers and bolts that have apparently come loose from some piece of furniture somewhere in the house. 

Plus her toys. I’m talking My Little Ponies, various pieces from her Wonder Woman costume, pink and purple Legos, baby dolls, the list goes on. 

If you’re looking for Tess during the day, chances are she’s there. When Tighe’s not talking on the phone or Zoom, they’ll converse—him, standing at the standing desk he brought home from work and staring at his spreadsheets and emails. And her, sitting cross-legged on the floor of the closet tinkering with all the small treasures she’s accumulated there. 

Believe it or not—fans of Tess’s scowl are usually surprised by this—Tess is a talker. She doesn’t talk as much as Nate, that would be impossible, but she talks way more than Sam. Lots of questions and chatter about her ponies and their relations and emotions and she wants you to be a character in her world. She misses her teachers and her friends at school. A lot. Her class had 2 boys and 10 girls in it. Ten girls.Ten. And she can’t even play with all the other little girls on our block because Pandemic. PANDEMIC.

Anyway. Eventually, Sam works his way down his daily checklist and gets to the item that I put on there EVERY SINGLE DAY: Read two books to Tess.

Two birds, one stone. Sam can practice his reading and Tess is entertained for a bit. And they’re pretty good about compromising to choose the book. Usually, she picks one: My Little Pony or Wonder Woman or Peppa Pig or The Nutcracker. And then he picks one: Captain Underpants or Dog Man or Big Nate. Whatever, reading is reading. 

And I’ve also let go of my responsibility to Lou a few too many times. Either I’ll leave him crying in his crib a few extra minutes than I usually would or I trust one of The Others to supervise him. 

And usually, that works really well. He’s not quite crawling yet—so close, though!—so there’s not a lot of trouble he can get into. 

Or so I thought. 

I attributed his recent constipation to the introduction of solid foods. He’s loving that, by the way, lunging for everything I put on the tray in front of him, scooping it to his mouth as fast as he can and getting frustrated as most of it falls into his lap or gets smeared onto his face. Eating is a developing skill.

Anyway, after more than three full days of not pooping, I was starting to get slightly worried. I wasn’t sure whether his nighttime fussing was from teething or a tummy ache. There were a few nights that he was up every hour.

So after his nap on Thursday morning, I was really embarrassingly excited when I smelled poop in his diaper, celebrating his accomplishment with songs and kisses.  

And then I opened his diaper.

“What the—?”

There, in the middle of the poopy mess, was an object. About an inch long and half an inch wide. Navy blue in origin, but it was now tinted in the watery shades of brown and green that make up Lou’s feces. 

A crayon? A blue crayon?

I finished changing the diaper, but I left the soiled diaper on the changing table so I could get a second opinion. 

I grabbed the first warm body I saw when I emerged from his room.

“Sam! Come look at this.”

Sam and I leaned in close, peering at the contents of the diaper from all angles. 

“What do you think? A crayon?”

“No, not a crayon,” Sam spoke slowly—as he does everything—still examining the object.

“It’s a Nerf dart. Tess gave it to him the other day.”

And then he sauntered away, carefree as always, probably off to the third floor playroom to work on a Lego project.

I flashed back to earlier in the week, when I picked a foam Nerf dart up off of the living room floor and there was a chunk missing. I didn’t think anything of it at the time because Rocket likes to chew them up, too. They’re not as plentiful as Legos in our house, but there are literally dozens of them scattered of them in just about every room, including Tess’s—er, I mean our—master bedroom closet.