Olka:
There are times when the most beautiful word in the world sounds like a screwdriver. “Mama!” Each child accentuates them differently, depending on the need. “Mom” is different when they want to ask something, different when they want to hug, completely different when they want to complain, different when they want to eat and drink, it sounds absolutely differently when they do not know what they want and call us only for no reason. This last “Mom” is the worst! Each mother recognizes what each “Mom” means, without the need to listen to the rest of the message. And each of us knows that there are such “Mom!” that evoke our convulsions. I have three children and, apart from the diversity of “Mom” imposed by their specific needs, each of my children also has its own way of stressing this word. Emil accentuates and extends the second syllable, Maciek accentuates and extends the first one, and Natalka always raises the intonation on the extended final A of MAMA.
I sometimes love every “Mom”, sometimes I hate it. The worst is when all three “Mom” overlap, and when there is Dominik, we have an entire ghostly orchestra.
“Mom” is always loud, even if I am standing right next to my kids. I noticed that Maciek sometimes screams “Mom” before he even thinks about what he wants to tell me, then he makes up the topic quickly, and if he does not come up with any, he adds “nothing”. And this is how the conversation looks like:
Maciek: Mom!
Me: Yes?
Maciek: Nothing.
Besides calling us, they (children) also make a lot of noise. They love to talk at the same time, they usually talk to each other when someone else speaks. It works the same way as yawning. Yawning occurs on a domino basis. It is enough that one person in the room yawns, and immediately after that, everybody else yawn one by one, even if they are not sleepy at all. The same is with the talk of kids. Once one of them starts talking, the other kids explode with their monologues, even if they have nothing special to say. And if they do not speak, then at least they imitate the sound of a car, a rocket, a gunfire or a dinosaur. But they are always loud. Many times I wondered why children do not like to imitate the sound of grass or boiling soup. After all, they sometimes play home, so the grass is always in front of the house, and the soup is usually cooked in the kitchen. But they usually mimic the house sounds of the garage or hammering a nail into the wall. When they were small, I often whispered to them. Why have they not learnt it?
Apart from producing all these sounds, they also watch the shortest distance between them and me. When I cook dinner and Natalka chats with me, she never sits in one place in the chair, she just follows me around the kitchen, as if she was my personal bodyguard. When Ewka comes round for a coffee, this coffee usually almost spills onto the blocks that the boys play with, because they are actually sitting on our knees while building. And they have to hug us every thirty seconds. Natalka happily sits next to us, she is old enough to believe that our conversations are very interesting to her, so there is no secret confessing when she is at home. Even Emil, whose umbilical cord is the longest, loves to absorb us with what he hasjust built, drown, read, or even found on the internet. Children are just most annoying when we drink coffee.
Today, we tried to work on the graphic design of the blog with Ewka. After one hour of fruitless work, we gave up. Although Weronika stayed at home with Patryk, the other children did not allow us to do anything. In fact, we did not even drink coffee. In the gap between moving their toys, answering their questions, searching for lost books, preparing them food and drink, then feeding, hugging, or praising their work, we managed to turn the computer on.
