The Permanent Emergency
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One morning around 6, the police banged on our door. “OPEN UP!” they shouted, the way police shout when they definitely have an alternative in mind for if you won’t.
I was awake at the time, because the kids were up early and I was on shift. I opened the door. The cops seemed mollified by the fact that I was carrying twin toddlers and looked too frazzled to commit any difficult crimes. They said they’d gotten a 9-1-1 call from my house with plenty of screaming. Had there been any murders in the past hour or so?
I never did figure out how the police got called. My first guess was that one of the twins had gotten their hands on a phone and dialed random things, but neither my nor my wife’s call history showed anything incriminating. My second guess was that they’d screamed at Alexa so hard that it called emergency services, but the documentation says Alexa doesn’t have that function. Maybe a neighbor called and the police got the location wrong, I don’t know.
I do have a pretty good idea about the screaming, though. When Kai demanded “the sun song”, I had accidentally told Alexa to play Raffi’s version of Mister Golden Sun instead of SuperSimpleSongs’ version. Kai did not consider this a sufficiently faithful rendition, and made his displeasure clear to everyone in the neighborhood at six in the morning. Then Lyra didn’t like that Kai was screaming, and started screaming too. By the time I realized the song mishap, I couldn’t rectify my mistake, because they were screaming too loud for Alexa to hear my commands (and too loud for them to notice if the song changed anyway).
Again, I don’t know if this was why the police got called - maybe in a few weeks I’ll learn one of our neighbors got murdered within the GPS margin-of-error of our house. But I like to think that it was. My toddlers jointly calling 911 because I played a slightly different version of their favorite song is too perfect a metaphor to lose. Everything about having toddlers feels like a permanent emergency.
Often it’s the songs. They like songs, but rarely the same ones, and their tastes can change mid-note. I try my best to keep up, but after switching back and forth between a pair of songs three or four times, as Kai (it’s always Kai) vacillates over which one he wants, sometimes I give up and let him scream it out. He dreams of one day breaking free of his dependence on me and learning to command Alexa himself. In this he is constantly frustrated - he can’t pronounce the incantations with the required precision. Some of the hardest I’ve ever laughed was listening to him trying desperately, pleadingly, to make Alexa play Rockin’ Robin. “Asasa, play Rabu Rabu! Asasa, play Rogu Roku! Asasa, play Ruku Roobu!” Alas, his beloved refuses to so much as acknowledge his existence.
Unable to pronounce the titles of most songs, our children have developed their own monikers. Mister Golden Sun is “sun song”. Wheels On The Bus is “bus song”. Here Comes The Sun is . . . also “sun song”, but don’t worry, if you choose the wrong one they’ll let you know by screaming. Dayenu is “die die die song”, which is awkward in the wrong company.
Every time the children learn a new word, they test whether it’s a song. When they got into fish, they asked for the fish song. When they saw a butterfly, they asked about a butterfly song. We relay these requests to Alexa, who comes through magnificently - the algorithm knows we want children’s songs related to a certain concept, and can usually find one. I recently learned that there is, in fact, a cottage industry among mildly scummy musicians in creating songs with whatever title they expect young children to ask for - especially “The Poop Song” - and raking in the $0.001 that Jeff Bezos hands out per Alexa impression from mildly mischievous two-year-olds.
We’ve learned songs we could never previously have imagined. The Mommy Song is an unbearably saccharine song about how much everyone loves Mommy, so overdone that the real Mommy begs me to make it stop. The Daddy Song, in contrast, is some kind of rap-adjacent song by a nubile young woman for whom “daddy” is clearly a euphemism, and is equally banned in our household. The Doggy Song is by an artist called “The Guy Who Sings Your Name Over And Over” - he must be really raking in those $0.001 checks.
Alexa almost never fails. One time, after our babysitter Jonah left, the children demanded “the Jonah song”. I figured there was no way, but Alexa gave us a Christian kids’ song called Whale Did Swallow Jonah. The twins were maybe 90% fascinated, 10% concerned. "Whale swallow Jonah?" Kai asked. I tried to explain that this wasn’t Jonah the babysitter, but I don't know if it sunk in.
Buses are another emergency. The mandated emergency procedure is to shout “BUS! BUS! BUS! BUS!” in a loop, until defused by a parent saying “Yes, it’s a bus.” The same goes for many other forms of transportation. And the parent isn’t allowed to just phone it in - if a child is looping “MUZZKA! MUZZKA! MUZZKA!”, you can’t just say “Yeah, I guess,” or “Sure, okay, muzzka.” They’ll know your heart isn’t in it. You have to drill down: “What’s a muzzka?” Cue the kid pointing to the road. “You mean, uh, that car looks like mom’s car?” “NOOOOOO!” “Uh, that ice cream truck is making music?” “NOOOOOO! MUZZKA!” “Oh, you mean a motorcycle!” “YEAH! MUZZKA!” and only then will the curse be broken.
I can’t remember who said this, but I can’t unsee it - toddlers, much more than adults, are still running off evolved instincts that expect the ancestral environment and a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Their programming is clear: their first and most important task is to learn the names and calls of every animal. This applies to animals they see (doggie! woof woof!), to animals they know only by reputation (lion! raaooooaaaaar!) and to any sufficiently megafauna-like object in the vicinity (train! choo-choo!) Give them a task from this list, and they’ll be the most zealous students you’ve ever seen. Ask them to learn something else - like that pills aren’t food and you shouldn’t eat them - and it’s back to I am just a little baby, how can you expect me to remember facts?
This leads me to propose - I don’t care what the anthropologists say, we all know modern hunter-gatherers aren’t representative of our hominid ancestors - that our forebears used toddlers as some kind of lookout. Their job was to sit on top of a tree, scan the savanna, and, when they saw something, inform the tribe: ANTELOPE! ANTELOPE! ANTELOPE! and not stop until another family member closed the loop “Antelope acknowledged, over and out.”
Books can be an emergency too, although my children have different ways of relating to them. Lyra relates to books by sitting in my lap quietly while I read them to her. Kai relates to books by tolerating this for one page, then grabbing it, yelling “MY BOOK!” flipping the pages until he finds the best page, then holding it open to the best page and defending it against anyone who might try to flip it to other, inferior pages. The best page varies by book, but it’s usually whichever page has one of the following on it: dogs, berries, trains, buses, the sun, or the moon (the moon takes pride of place, for some reason - I’m working on a theory about the ancestral environment where toddlers were used as assistant shamans charged with monitoring the moon’s position at all times). Then Kai will stare lovingly at the page, pointing at the moon and saying “Moon!” every so often. Then Lyra will scream and try to turn the page. Then Kai will scream because she’s trying to switch away from the objectively best page and you’re such an idiot, you’ll just be moving to a worse page with fewer moons, why would you do that?
In my Missing Heritability: Much More Than You Wanted To Know, I reviewed some arguments against twin studies. Most of the good arguments have been investigated and debunked, most of the mediocre arguments have also been investigated and debunked, and what’s left are the dregs. In particular, some scientists propose that one way twin studies could falsely show a large effect of genes on education, was if there’s actually a gene for one twin to sabotage the other’s educational prospects. I made fun of this one pretty hard - how much motivated cognition do you need to think that the most parsimonious explanation is some sort of bizarre twin sabotage mutation? God punished me for my mockery by sending me a son obsessed with sabotaging his twin sister’s education. All Lyra wants to do is learn to read; all Kai wants to do is steal her books so he can flip them to the moon page, then defend it with his life.
(This has also informed my opinion on all those blog posts where people say it’s the fault of the Feminized Longhouse Matriarchy that girls outperform boys in elementary school. I now think we’ll discover their long-sought ‘boy-friendly teaching methods’ around the same time we finally eliminate the ‘bro culture’ that prevents women from winning exactly 50% of physics Nobels.)
The biggest emergency of all is bedtime. It must be approached cautiously, even obliquely. We start with a “ten minutes to bedtime” warning, then a five minute warning, then a one minute warning, all of which are totally ignored. Then a ten second countdown. The moment the countdown starts, Kai runs to the table and screams “MY FOOD!”, because he knows we’re softies and won’t let him go to bed hungry. It doesn’t matter if he ate five minutes ago, he needs more food now, come on, come on, you wouldn’t let me spend the whole night locked in my dark crib starving, would you, would you? So we let him have some more food, which he eats as slowly as possible, until I finally get tired of this and forcibly carry him to bed. The whole time, he screams “MY FOOD! MY FOOOOOOD!” like a demented leprechaun being dragged away from his Lucky Charms.
Next, I take him into the bathroom to brush his teeth. I put toothpaste on the brush. “More,” he demands. I add more toothpaste. “More,” he demands. We go through this cycle about five times - if I actually added more toothpaste each time, the brush would be enveloped in a giant glob of goo, but after the second time I just fake it, and he never notices.
Next is diaper change time, a transition announced by Kai shouting “NO DIAPER CHANGE”. This has never worked, not even once. It often does the opposite of working, because sometimes we’ll be playing outside or something, and Kai will apropos of nothing announce “NO DIAPER CHANGE”, and then I’ll know he needs a diaper change. I will placate him by playing his favorite song during the diaper change, for ten seconds, until he changes his mind and gets a different favorite song, and so on until we’re done.
Next is Lulling Time. I will quietly rock him in the rocking chair. Sometimes I will tell him about his day (“Today you went to the zoo and saw the animals. Wasn’t that fun?”) He will drink his cup of milk. Finally, I will tell him that it is time to go to sleep. “NO! MY MILK!” he will shout, so I’ll give him more time to drink his cup of milk. We’ll go through this process at least three or four times. At least we used to. Last night, I happened to pick up his cup after a few seconds, and realized it was already empty - he drinks all of the milk basically immediately. The rest is just fake drinking to buy time.
Finally, I put him in bed, and he immediately starts crying. All the How To Be A Parent books say that you should just let the toddler cry it out and he’ll eventually learn to sleep on his own. Unfortunately, Kai has been reading the How To Be A Toddler books, and they all say that you should never, under any circumstances, stop crying, because then your parents will think they won, and that they can sometimes get away with not doing what you want. So we’re at an impasse. Usually after 15 or 30 minutes my wife or I repeats Lulling Time, and this time maybe it sticks.
You may notice that one of the twins gets more billing in this piece than the other. I promise I’m not trying to play favorites. But our parental division of labor is that, when they have different needs, I take Kai and my wife takes Lyra - so I spend more time with him, and I know him better. And Kai has inherited my hyperverbosity, and Lyra her mother’s circumspection, so it’s harder to get a read on her.
But also, the twins have spontaneously decided that, in the comedy of life, Kai will be the wise guy and Lyra the straight man. As such, there’s less about her to make fun of. Lyra reacts relatively normally to buses. Her favorite song is “Choo Choo Train”, which she likes simply and earnestly, and which she listens to all the way through. She reads books in sequence: first one page, then the next. She goes to bed on time with little fuss.
The only true emergency for Lyra is when there are berries in front of her, in which case they must be consumed as quickly as possible - what if they’re really berry-shaped bombs, about to destroy our entire family?
Otherwise, she’s an island of calm in a crazy household.
(for more child-related content, see subscribers-only post, Learn Phrygian In Zero Days)