"I'm here about the nanny job. I'll keep a watchful eye on your kids, and if they get out of line ... Pow!"
Just because I have twins in the NICU, it doesn’t mean I spend all of my time by their side in the NICU. Even if the hospital let me hold them all day, I still have plenty of things to do back around the house. I have carpets to vacuum, food to cook, and a blog to blog. I also have another child to care for back in the house, our firstborn by the name of, um, Ashley? Allie? Abbie! I have to take care of Abbie, especially since Ellie is still recovering from her c-section and unable to lift or carry anything heavier than a preemie boy who’s still more than five weeks before his original due date.
I need to be careful to shower Abbie with sufficient attention to let her know that she’s still loved. I think all older children, especially firstborns, go through a bit of shock when a younger sibling comes home and sucks up their parents’ attention like an Oreck. That has to go double for older siblings of twins, whose parents are kept so busy with the twins’ needs that they experience debilitating sleep deprivation, as experienced parents of twins readily tell me with a suspicious amount of glee. I need to be sure that, no matter how tired I get, I spend quality time with Abbie every day to prevent her from growing up isolated and becoming one of those people her future neighbors describe as “a loner” on the local news after the cops pull multiple bodies out of her future backyard.
I learned to pay attention to the older child last night while watching the TV show “Supernanny.” Or maybe it was “Nanny 911.” Whichever one is the trashier, Fox-based show. Normally I don’t watch reality television, especially when competing networks televise pivotal sporting events, but the last night’s show caught Ellie’s eye while channel surfing. Since reality television is like a super-addictive visual form of crack, I also slummed around long enough to wallow in its filth.
The premise of last night’s show was the nanny visited a family with a five-year-old boy and three-and-a-half-year-old twin girls, an eerily similar situation to the one our children will live in by 2009. We started watching for advice for our current family, and to spot the traps this family fell into so we can avoid them now. Plus it was really fun to watch this messed-up family scream at each other … no! Must … look … away … from … train wreck…
The main lesson we took from the show was to spend time with the oldest child. Their oldest had grown accustomed to, at best, being ignored at best, or, at worst, having his head bit off for the slightest infraction because his parents were so flustered trying to keep the twins in line. The result was the boy careened back and forth between extremes of major disobedience to get attention and withdrawing from the family to the point where he was too scared to bother his parents when he genuinely needed help. At least that’s the convenient portrait the show created with suitable video clips for the nanny to solve within the show’s time constraints. Real life may have been different, but reality television seldom has time for real life.
The family solved this problem by having mom spend an afternoon fishing with just their boy. The multiple hours filled the boy with so much delight that he immediately became permanently well behaved. That’s what I assume happened anyway; I turned the TV off shortly after learning the lesson to spend quality time with the oldest child. Other lessons I learned include establish proper bedtime routines early in life, don’t yell at your children in front of cameras for a major television network show, and never watch “Nanny 911” again. Those lessons will serve me well as I spend the next 17 years raising, uh … Abbie!
I need to be careful to shower Abbie with sufficient attention to let her know that she’s still loved. I think all older children, especially firstborns, go through a bit of shock when a younger sibling comes home and sucks up their parents’ attention like an Oreck. That has to go double for older siblings of twins, whose parents are kept so busy with the twins’ needs that they experience debilitating sleep deprivation, as experienced parents of twins readily tell me with a suspicious amount of glee. I need to be sure that, no matter how tired I get, I spend quality time with Abbie every day to prevent her from growing up isolated and becoming one of those people her future neighbors describe as “a loner” on the local news after the cops pull multiple bodies out of her future backyard.
I learned to pay attention to the older child last night while watching the TV show “Supernanny.” Or maybe it was “Nanny 911.” Whichever one is the trashier, Fox-based show. Normally I don’t watch reality television, especially when competing networks televise pivotal sporting events, but the last night’s show caught Ellie’s eye while channel surfing. Since reality television is like a super-addictive visual form of crack, I also slummed around long enough to wallow in its filth.
The premise of last night’s show was the nanny visited a family with a five-year-old boy and three-and-a-half-year-old twin girls, an eerily similar situation to the one our children will live in by 2009. We started watching for advice for our current family, and to spot the traps this family fell into so we can avoid them now. Plus it was really fun to watch this messed-up family scream at each other … no! Must … look … away … from … train wreck…
The main lesson we took from the show was to spend time with the oldest child. Their oldest had grown accustomed to, at best, being ignored at best, or, at worst, having his head bit off for the slightest infraction because his parents were so flustered trying to keep the twins in line. The result was the boy careened back and forth between extremes of major disobedience to get attention and withdrawing from the family to the point where he was too scared to bother his parents when he genuinely needed help. At least that’s the convenient portrait the show created with suitable video clips for the nanny to solve within the show’s time constraints. Real life may have been different, but reality television seldom has time for real life.
The family solved this problem by having mom spend an afternoon fishing with just their boy. The multiple hours filled the boy with so much delight that he immediately became permanently well behaved. That’s what I assume happened anyway; I turned the TV off shortly after learning the lesson to spend quality time with the oldest child. Other lessons I learned include establish proper bedtime routines early in life, don’t yell at your children in front of cameras for a major television network show, and never watch “Nanny 911” again. Those lessons will serve me well as I spend the next 17 years raising, uh … Abbie!
posted by Matt at
10:36 PM
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