Filling in the Gap: A (Very) Short List of Activities for Pre-Tweens and Toddlers
Among the many types of social media posts that annoyed me during our trying-to-conceive and then trying-to-adopt era, was one that went something like this:
DH* and I have a DD, 2, who is the light of our lives, but of course exhausting because she’s a toddler! We’ve always wanted two kids, but my pregnancy was rough and I’m just getting my groove back at work. Wondering what the ideal age gap between kids is? Can we wait another year, or will DD miss out on sibling closeness if she’s more than three years older than her baby bro or sis?
It seemed like such a first-world problem—to not only have the option of more than one kid, but to actually have a say in the timing. Posts about trying to time a pregnancy so that maternity leave would dovetail with summer break made my head explode.
Almost ten years later, I have softened a bit. First world problems are still problems. Manageable dilemmas still require managing. And—with time, family financial help for adoption fees, some false starts, and some minor miracles—my partner and I are now the parents of two children.
There are seven and a half years between them.
*
My childhood best friend, Bonnie, was the “oops” third child in her family, and her brothers were six and eight years older than her. Dan introduced us to cool music and his cool friends, and drew the Red Hot Chili Peppers asterisk in Sharpie on his JanSport backpack; somehow it still takes up space in my mind as the literal symbol of Cool Older Person. Tim worked at Trader Joe’s and brought home the best snacks. He was always dating some petite brunette, which made me—a sandy-haired tween in the midst of an unwanted early growth spurt—aspire to be a petite brunette.
Meanwhile, my own sister was three years younger than me, and I fought with her constantly, scripting scenarios in which my My Little Ponies would not invite hers to parties, or convincing her to hide under her desk because the USSR was about to bomb us. Now she is my best friend. She is one of a small list of people whose existence seems integral to mine, like that sea bug that functions as that fish’s tongue after severing it (I’m not sure who is the fish and who is the tongue-bug in this metaphor, just that our relationship is both beautiful and a little weird, like most sibling relationships).
So I knew firsthand that this “ideal age gap” myth was just that.
*
When Joey, the youngest, was an infant, I emailed Meg, Editor in Chief of MUTHA and mom to two kids with a chunk of years between them: It’s hard to find family activities that work well with an 8-year-old and an 8-month-old, and back in the day, we were a family-activities kind of family. So that’s a bummer.
She replied, I feel like my way of dealing with the gap at that stage was just take the baby along wherever the bigger kid needed to go, even if it’s like – this is not a baby place, sorry baby.
It’s good advice. Dash, our now-nine-year-old, is convinced that “we never get to do anything I want to do,” even though we quite literally structure most of our leisure time around him. His baseball games, his friends’ birthday parties, his need to spend quality time fighting with the neighbors. My partner C.C. and Joey and I are just his entourage.
The last Saturday before he started fourth grade, I tried to plan a trip to our local splash pad with friends who have a four-year-old. Dash is not too old to enjoy a game of chicken with a jet stream of water. But he is too old to enjoy it without his peers, as it turns out. And so our family outing split. Joey and I went to the splash pad, and C.C. and Dash saw Inside Out 2 for the second time.
I pouted a lot about it. Why does life have to be so fragmented? I am not asking too much! Am I? I’m not like my parents, who choreographed everything in lockstep, the four of us against the world, or, more accurately, a bubble moving through it. We visited historical monuments and went to free concerts in the park and selected VHS tapes to watch on Saturday nights as a foursome. Only as an adult did I ask myself why—given that my mom was an artist and had been an art history major—we never went to art museums as a family.
When I mentioned this to my dad recently, he said, “That’s not true. We went to that place where they keep Blue Boy,”
Okay, that is true. We went to the Huntington Library & Art Museum one time.
Only now am I asking myself why my mom never went on her own. Or with me or my sister. Or with a friend. She died two decades ago, and I won’t get to, but I can speculate. She felt safer and more peaceful when she was with the three of us, and those things added up to something like happiness, and if art museums were the cost, so be it. I get it.
If I could choose how my family was going to spend the weekend, I’d take us all to The Comedy of Arrs, which is The Comedy of Errors reimagined with pirates and mermaids. I mean, come on! How cute is that? And it’s free!
“It’s not really my thing,” Dash said politely. His things are YouTube and trampoline parks and water balloon fights and Roblox. Lately, politeness is not really his thing, so I should probably be grateful he let me down easy.
Going to a splash pad is kind of my thing. I like the outdoors and things that are free (see above). But I know that if I want to see a play, I’m on my own. And I will go on my own. I recently bought a ticket to a friend’s staged reading. I understand that families come apart and together. I just want a little more together.
*
I’ve been making a tongue-in-cheek list in the Notes app on my phone of activities that an almost-tween and toddler can do together. Or at least my particular almost-tween and toddler. It is paltry, and what works one day will likely fail the next. But while C.C. sees the answer to family togetherness as “Plan a trip to Disneyland” (and she’s not wrong), I see it as “Pause and appreciate those five minutes when we’re all in the living room and no one is fighting or glued to an iPad, or fighting over who gets to be glued to the iPad.” I’m not wrong either.
Together, they can:
- Scream into a fan to make their voices sound weird
- Take a bath and then do a naked penis dance in the living room**
- Share French fries. If you are lucky, the toddler will refer to everything with an elongated shape as “fwy,” and you will get away with feeding him carrot-stick “fries” one or two times before he calls bullshit.
- Watch the shows the big kid pretends he’s too old for but secretly loves. Included but not limited to Blippi, Peppa Pig, and Dinosaur Train.
- Read board books out loud. The big kid resists non-required reading with the force of a thousand suns, but when you bribe him to read during the summer, he selects books with the fewest words possible—board books about farm animals, Elephant and Piggie if he’s in an intellectual mood—which are extremely well received by the little kid.
- Take turns trying to shove each other through the cat door
- Go to a minor league baseball game. Hear me (a person who does not care about sports that don’t involve back flips) out: Minor league baseball games are like major league baseball games except that they cost less, have easy parking, and let you get close to the field. The nine-year-old will love the baseball and hot dogs, and the toddler will fall truly, madly, deeply in love with the team’s dinosaur mascot and stalk him throughout the stands.
- Swim in a pond
- When you return from vacation and no longer have access to a pond, let them fill a cooler with water and cram their bodies into it
- Wash your car, if you’re not picky about soap streaks (and why would you be—the interior is full of fries and socks anyway)
- Basically anything with water
That’s it. That’s what I’ve got so far. A thousand-plus words of whining and a handful bullet points with pseudo-recommendations. When it comes to parenting, I think a lot about the difference between meaning and happiness, happiness and pleasantness, pleasantness and peace. I feel confident that there is meaning in the work of parenting; the rest seems up for debate.
On a recent Tuesday night, I felt as I do at the end of many days: as if my brain had been slowly pushed through a cheese grater. The noise! The needs! The squabbling! The vibes! To make matters worse, I had contracted a cold that made my eyes itch and ooze. Cheese grater brain and sandpaper eyeballs. But on a whim, C.C. suggested an evening walk with the kids, and miraculously, Dash went for it. The fact that we agreed to make the ice cream shop our destination probably greased the wheels for the miracle.
C.C. had read that there was supposed to be a super moon that night—a full moon, at the closest point in its orbit to earth. We scanned the navy-gray sky, but all we could see were airplanes and a few scattered stars.
We got our ice cream and ate on the patio, which was enclosed and unpopulated. The metal tables and chairs presented themselves to Joey as a jungle gym. Dash gave him bites of his Cookie Monster ice cream, which Joey called “ummy.” “More ummy,” he demanded, and for a sweet minute, their tongues were a matching, unnatural blue.
***
*DH = “dear hubby” and DD = “dear daughter” in a certain subgenre of internet speak. I have used them here to create a maximally obnoxious vibe. Do people still use these terms? I am pleased to say I’m not in the sorts of Facebook groups to know anymore.
**Penises not required
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