The Reject's Top Five: Unanticipated Perks of Parenting

There are some highlights of becoming a parent that you can totally envision before your child arrives. Others are a bit less expected. Here is a short list of the (mostly) good things that I did not foresee about becoming a parent.

5.) Other parents - You can meet some great people through your kids. I would put this higher on the list, but you can also meet some real duds.

4.) Day drinking - This is self explanatory. When you're the boss, the only one searching for bottles of booze in your desk drawers is...you! (Also a good way to evaluate potential playdate partners in crime. See above.)

3.) Sandra Boynton and Dr. Seuss - You can insert your own favorite children's authors here. Getting to read entertaining stories that rhyme over and over again is pretty cool.

2.) Mummy Tummy - This is all about seeing the silver lining. I don't worry about toning my stomach anymore because other people already assume I am pregnant and I no longer bother to correct them.

1.) Kids Menus - In addition to whatever "adult" entree I feel like ordering I can now have mac and cheese with every meal (ditto fries, chicken strips, grilled cheese, or pancakes). Of course, I can't sit down long enough to eat it, but I can say from experience that peripatetic pasta tastes just as delicious as the seated kind. And for those of you who are opposed to kids menus, my daughter doesn't really eat anything except olives, cheese, and salami so this is all about me, not her self-imposed Atkins palate.

Pit Me an Olive, Girl!

Is it just me or has this whole preschool thing gotten completely out of hand? Processing fees that are five - or ten - times what I paid to apply to graduate school? Tuitions that run more than I spent on a year of college?

My daughter is two. And while I do want the very best for her, I also think is it reasonable to stop and ponder what exactly these schools are going to teach her that is worth an annual outlay greater than I earned teaching philosophy to ungrateful eighteen year olds. And, more importantly, what is it that she actually needs to learn at this point - that is, besides how to use the big girl potty and not to pick her nose and eat it? (Two lessons, incidentally, that I am hoping we can teach her at home.)

Answers seem to include things like "working cooperatively" and "social responsibility" and "environmental stewardship," which all sound great in theory, but will really annoy the crap out of me when I'm getting a lecture about why not to kill the ants invading our bathroom.

What I'm most interested in having my kid learn right now are useful skills. Useful for me. I am interested in vocational training: things like doing dishes, dusting, pedicures. A bead sorting station and shoelace board may improve manual dexterity but unless they improve my daughter's ability to fold laundry or mix a martini by the time she's three, I'm not really all that impressed.

Of course, these schools are beautiful. Calm. They smell good. I would like to spend the day there. And if my freeloading toddler would get off her lazy tush and do some real work around here, or enroll in a freaking pageant or something, maybe we could afford for me to attend in the fall.

And that's kind of the point, because like most aspects of parenting today, it often seems that much of what we feel we should do for our kids seems actually to be more about us, not them. It is just much nicer to think about our children learning Swahili and molding the Venus de Milo out of bespoke (organic!) playdoh than pulling hair and eating paste in some regular old daycare - or worse, just playing alone at home (which I think used to be called "being a kid" back when our luddite parents left us in playpens and put us to sleep on our stomachs).

I'm not trying to judge; I'm pretty sure kids pull hair and eat paste no matter where they go to school. And I don't know where my daughter is going to end up. But I do find the costs of all forms of childcare a bit staggering (babysitters included!) in light of the fact that I'm pretty sure my kid could not tell the difference between the Motel 6 or Mandarin Oriental of preschools at this point. Or if she could, she wouldn't really care. She's too excited that they have sinks her height. They had her at "play kitchen."

All parents want the best for their kids. But when we find ourselves asking whether it would be creepy if we raided our daughter's therapy fund to pay for pre-kindergarten - what if we charged ourselves interest? - well, it just seems things have gone too far.

At the end of the day, I have to remind myself that I didn't even go to preschool. And I learned my alphabet in...wait for it...kindergarten. The horror! And I turned out okay. Or mostly okay. I mean, I can't speak Swahili but I do mix a mean martini.

Speculum + Tantrum = Tantric Spectaculum!!

I sort of thought I had hit a parenting low when I had to scrape poop out of my daughter's diaper into this tiny test tube thing using a plastic q-tip in front of a roomful of strangers while my kid screamed and did corkscrews in her infant carrier - pretty much the baby equivalent of borrowing your car to do donuts in the church parking lot.

And then a few weeks ago, I thought I had hit a new low during a babysitter interview when my daughter pulled off her diaper, grabbed the poop, tried to throw it, and then launched into an epic tantrum involving windmill arms, helicopter legs and bloodcurdling cries of "BOOBS!"

However, as with all things maternal, the nadir can always drop down a few notches. In fact, sometimes all it takes is a trip to the gynecologist. A trip with child. An actual child, not one in your belly. (Ah, to return to those delusional pregnant days when a fuzzy ultrasound image set off a cascade of greeting card visions of the kind of mother I was going to be. Somehow drool, poop, and cursing never figured prominently into those fantasies.)

It seemed like a bad idea from the start, this bringing along a child who is really more like a walking time-bomb, or a grenade - or whatever explosive device has the shortest and most unpredictable fuse. But sometimes babysitters don't work out and doctors' offices have ridiculous multi-month waitlists and partners/spouses have inconveniently scheduled meetings (damn them!) and you find yourself wondering if you should try to explain to your toddler what is going to happen in the next hour or whether it might just be better to sit back and watch the trainwreck unfold.

My parenting style, like electricity, always takes the path of least resistance. So armed with an iPad, olives, and a sippy cup of tequila, we embarked on our joint obstetric adventure.

There are not many things I'd like to do less with an afternoon than visit the gynecologist. Although I can now say definitively that even lower on my list is making the trip with a super-active, over-tired two year old. Because if nothing says "awkward and uncomfortable" like having your legs up in stirrups while a stranger pokes around your lady parts, having it done while your terrorized child stands next to you waving her arms and frantically yelling "no, no, no!" while trying to drag you off the examining table is infinitely worse.

She also tried to escape from the room - twice - while I was naked, and when it became clear she wasn't going to calm down, we eventually finished the appointment with me holding her, sobbing, on my chest, on the examining table, still naked. I wish I hadn't been lying about that sippy cup of tequila, because I really could have used it.

I also had to get a flu shot and some blood drawn and not to get all "Blind Side" on you, but I'm betting from the stink she raised that my kid would test pretty high on protective instincts, too, judging from the way I thought she was going to tackle the nurse and pulled out the aforementioned windmills and helicopter kicks for the phlebotomist.

I'm so proud.

Eventually a combination of stickers, Stuart Little, and carte blanche on the elevator buttons calmed her down. But I still stuck another hundred in the therapy jar just in case. She's going to need it. Possibly even more than me.