A friend sent my husband an email recently:
“We found an old DVD of yours when we were cleaning out our basement. It’s labeled Summer 2007. Do you want it? I can drop it in the mail.”
My husband replied, “Sure. That would be great. Thanks.”
I had to wonder, How in the hell did our friends come to have a DVD with picture of our kids in their possession?
The summer of 2007 was the summer after our second son was born. He was an infant and our first son was 20 months old. We had kids before a lot of our friends were even married. I attended eight weddings either pregnant or newly postpartum not-so-carefully timing the pumping of breast milk with glasses of champagne.
When the DVD arrived, it already had a relic quality to it. Do people still watch DVD’s in this age of streaming everything?
My kids, now 10 and 8, found the package on the dining room table and asked, “What’s this?”
“Some old pictures of when you were a baby that my friends found, want to watch it?” I asked.
“Sure,” they replied.
It was that time after dinner where everyone is tired but it’s too early for bed and the odds of sibling bickering and meltdowns peak. Because we never bothered to hook up our DVD player after our recent move, we tromped up to my office and popped the DVD into my computer to see what we would find.
When my kids were younger, I video taped them on a camcorder (remember those?) and uploaded the pictures to iMovie where I created movies and slideshows with our favorite songs from that particular period. It seemed like a great idea at the time. I was able to keep it up for three years before bagging it for other pursuits like competitive wine drinking and that dusty career I had put on the shelf.
We cue up the video portion of the DVD which turns out is almost an hour long.
And it’s painful to watch. We were those parents–the ones who thought that everything their babies did was the most amazing thing that has every happened in the history of the universe, the same parents that I roll my eyes at now.
And in some ways we were right. In the monotony of those early parenting days, anything that happened seemed epic – a toddler dancing! A baby rolling over! A baby smiling AND waving his arms! A toddler hitting a ball off a tee! Again and again and again.
The first thing I think is “OMG, did we give this to our friends to watch? How horrifying. They didn’t even have kids then.”
The second thing I think is, “Watching this is like chewing glass.”
Nothing is happening. There’s an infant in a bouncy seat and toddler who does not talk. And we are trying desperately, for an entire hour, to get him to dance.
And there’s a very long segment where my husband is pushing the toddler around the yard on a big wheel and then we watch the non-speaking toddler mime the motions to an Eric Carle book.
It is clear that I was not a good editor.
Because I suffer from some pretty intense parenting amnesia, it was sweet to see my boys when they were that small, but after three minutes, I was over it.
I start fast forwarding. When I say that nothing is happening, I mean NOTHING is happening.
I skip to the next “scene” and here we are trying to get the toddler to dance – AGAIN. He’s in our old kitchen in our old house before we renovated it. I loved that kitchen even when it was a dump. It was vintage-y and seeing the old original 1950’s cabinets in the video gave me a sentimental pang. It lasted for about 3 seconds.
We watch the toddler in the kitchen holding an old iced tea jug while the baby sleeps in the bouncy seat. Thrilling.
Yet, I have to remember, that this was our LIFE. This is what we did every day.
The toddler is dancing waving the jug in the air. We finally have him on camera–dancing.
I think to myself, “Maybe this video is almost over.”
And then, the toddler takes the jug and whacks the sleeping baby on the head, who jerks for a moment and promptly goes back to sleep.
The toddler keeps dancing.
Watching this video, my sons and I burst into hysterical laughter. We rewind and watch the bonking a good 15 times.
Tears are streaming down our faces. We’re holding our sides, laughing and yelling, “Again! Again!”
Watching this video is a window into how terribly boring and painful those early days are as a new parent. There’s my huge leaky boobs and my obnoxious baby talking voice. Did I really look like that? Did I really sounds like that?
Watching this video is not nostalgic for me. I don’t long for those days. But it is a reminder about how far we’ve come. I mean they still bonk each other but usually not when the other one is sleeping.
Watching this video, I’m truly happy that we had our kids early and have moved on from that time, that place and even that house that I loved so much.
To my friends who I gave this DVD, I am truly sorry. We could not have painted a less exciting version of parenthood for you.
But, that was our world.
Maybe now that you have kids, you can understand a little bit more and forgive us for our need to thrust our child laden monotony on to you.
But that moment, when the baby gets bonked on the head and we laughed as a family over and over again–totally worth it.
Here it is my friends: The Bonk.
When Kaly doesn’t have her nose in a book, she wrangles and referees two elementary age boys and blogs about her humorous efforts to lead a mindful, connected life. She’s the author of Good Move: Strategy and Advice for Your Family’s Relocation a book about the craziness of moving with kids. Her writing has been featured on sites such as Mamalode, The Mid, In The Powder Room, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and Scary Mommy to name a few. You can find her on Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and Twitter.
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