Mr. Crab Hands

“Okay, Babyman, I’m going to change Babygirl’s diaper and then it’s time to get in our school clothes.”
“Nooooooooo!  It’s not tiiiiiiiime!”
“Yes, it is time.  Very much so.  Especially if you want to watch Thomas before you leave.”
“I don’t want to do it with you.  I want to do it with Mr. Crab Hands.”

“Babyman, I’m counting to three and I want you sitting on your bum with your feet out towards me or we are NOT going on a playdate.”
“But I waaaaaant to go on a playdate!”
“Then you need shoes and socks.  One…two… -”
“Can Mr. Crab Hands tickle me while I get my socks on?”

Mr. Crab Hands is the product of desperation.  He is, quite simply, my own hand, held in a claw shape, opening and closing like a mouth while I talk in a funny voice.  He sometimes tickles little necks or toes.  He and Mommy (that would be me) converse regularly about the things Babyman needs to do to get through the day, like some puppetless ventriloquism routine that is fooling…well…I don’t know, exactly, probably no one.  But even though I feel like a schizophrenic, Babyman digs it.  So I’m rolling with it.

I pose the question again, as I have so many times in the past three years: how, exactly, did I get here?

I was talking on the phone not long ago to a girlfriend who has a two-year-old.  “I am tired of convincing him that stuffed animals are going to fly out of his ass if he sits on the potty,” she opined.  “Sometimes I want him to do stuff because I want him to do it.  Why is that so hard??”

But then my other friend, who has a one-year-old and also happens to be a Kindergarten teacher, took the opposite view.  “Have you ever considered using puppets?” she asked.  “I have a lot of success when I use puppets to get my students to do stuff.”

Stop the madness!!  I said.  Puppets?!? I repeated.  No, I declared, I am not going to use puppets every time I want Babyman to do what I ask.  Plus, I reasoned, then you have to carry the damn puppets around with you all the time.  My bag is already too full.  Puppets, I made clear, are a bridge too far.

Until the next day, when I was trying trying trying to stick to my vow to be a positive and stable force in the household (even when Babygirl is screaming and hungry and Babyman is refusing to leave the playground and taking off his shoes and kicking sand in the air with his bare toes; even when not a single child in the house takes a nap and Babygirl won’t let me put her down and there are still two hours until my husband gets home; even then, even then…).

I can’t remember what the exact impetus was but I felt myself losing my cool after asking Babyman to do something for the tenth time and and suddenly, before I even realized what was happening, I was pretending my hand was a crab.  A talking crab.  Mr. Crab Hands, to be exact.  And it was working.

Babyman was laughing.  Babyman was responding.  He was doing what Mr. Crab Hands was asking him to do.  Now I’ve done it, I thought to myself.  Mr. Crab Hands is a part of my life.  And he’s not even a puppet, no sir.

He’s just a hand.  

The preschool brain continues to baffle me.

I have to remind myself multiple times in a day that I am the one who sets the tone.  And the tone can be disciplinary and combative, or the tone can be one of compromise and fun.  There will be battles — every day, there will be battles — but the battles are so much easier to stomach if I’ve been discriminating about picking them.  If Mr. Crab Hands gets the shoes on, and we all have a good laugh, that means I can save the time-out for kicking sand.  So I’ve gained something.

And so has Babyman.  He’s gained a friend.  Mr. Crab Hands.