Chelsea Kaplan’s Musings About Life... After Birth

When you are the parent of a toddler, you soon realize that experience of taking your child places that aren’t kid-friendly generally falls somewhere between “pretty difficult” and “a total and complete horrendously excruciating nightmare”.  Case in point: tonight my husband and I took our son to his first Passover Seder, which we attended at our amazing next-door neighbors’ home. While the event had all the makings of a lovely evening, it was completely nerve-wracking for the two of us, as our son was the only kid there who was under 14. From the minute we arrived he was a wild man; he ran around our neighbor’s home, grabbing the food in their dog’s bowl, pulling out each of their DVDs one by one and grabbing the tennis balls on the bottom of the hostess’s elderly father’s walker and screaming “Ball! Ball!” (much to Grandpa’s dismay). “Birth control, ladies,” I said to my neighbor’s two college-aged nieces as I yanked my son away from pushing the buttons on the dishwasher they were standing near. Fortunately, our hosts found his behavior amusing and weren’t in any way annoyed by it. Regardless, the evening was completely stressful for my husband and me; we basically spent the entire time praying for it to end without our kid totally wrecking our neighbors’ place or without our son having a meltdown, which luckily, he didn’t. While I loved being with our neighbors and their family, I couldn’t help but continually wish that we were at our home, surrounded by my kid’s books and toys, with multiple episodes of “Bob the Builder” queued up on the t.v. should a distraction (read: 15 minutes of peace and quiet) be necessary. Equally satisfactory would have been a room full of other parents with little ones, because you know those folks wouldn’t have batted and eyelash any time my kid yelled “CRACKER!” when the matzoh was in view or spit out his gefilte fish and declared it “yucky”.

As we left (early, as it was way past our son’s bedtime and his eyes were nearly rolling back in his head), we apologized for the chaos our kid created. “I told you when you invited us that he’d make for an entertaining Seder guest,” I said to the hostess as we walked out the door. “He was fine! He’s only 18 months old!” she sang. “Besides, when it’s not your kid, you barely even notice anyway.”

Perhaps she was lying to make us feel better, and if so, I appreciate it. However, I’m thinking that for next year’s Seder, it’s unleavened cheerios at our house, and all of y’all with little kids are invited.